Arrives December 7 with the face of Pilar Fogliati and with the production of Lux Vide the first all-Italian Christmas series to land on Netflix, in all countries where the service is active, with a setting in the Venetian lagoon that will help its international journey. It’s about ‘I hate Christmas‘, a romantic comedy in 6 episodes, which sees the actress (already in the cast of many television successes, from ‘One step from Heaven’ to ‘Hearts’) struggling with the search for love for the most critical moment of the year, the one of the days before Christmas dinner with the family.
Pilar Fogliati is the protagonist Gianna who, in fact, hates Christmas. “Because – explains the actress – the holiday season is inevitably the one in which she takes stock and meets her family, impatient to know if there is anything new in her life, especially sentimental. Me too, who will turn 30 at the end of December and who I have a boyfriend, I already know that at Christmas I will be asked: why don’t you get married?”, he smiles. Gianna thus realizes that her three friends and a job as a nurse that she likes won’t be enough to defend herself from questions from relatives and she decides that she will arrive at the Christmas Eve dinner accompanied by her. She has 24 days to figure out who will be with her: 24 days, “because it was nice to associate it with the Advent calendar”, which Gianna will spend up and down the bridges of Chioggia and the calli of Venice, between blind dates, colossal mistakes, nights of sex and crying with friends. 24 days to come to the conclusion that it’s not Christmas that judges her, but she herself. And that love is close at hand, you just need to know how to see it and accept life for that imperfect path full of unexpected events that it is.
In the cast, alongside Pilar Fogliati, there are: Beatrice Arnera (Titti) and Cecilia Bertozzi (Caterina), who play her best friends, and Fiorenza Pieri (Margherita), who plays her sister. Massimo Rigo and Sabrina Paravicini are Pietro and Marta, Gianna’s parents, while Marzia Ubaldi plays Matilde, the elderly hospital patient in whom the protagonist confides.
The series is directed by the Crics (Davide Mardegan and Clemente De Muro who admit “it was a challenge but it became a very easy challenge because we worked with great professionals”), while the screenplay is signed by Elena Bucaccio (“Christmas is a lens of ‘magnification, it’s a particle accelerator for stories”, says), Viola Rispoli and Silvia Leuzzi. The series is produced by Matilde and Luca Bernabei for Lux Vide, a company of the Fremantle Group, and is an adaptation of the Norwegian Netflix series ‘Christmas with a stranger’ by Per-Olav Sørensen.
“We had two dreams in life: to do a series with Netflix and to do a Christmas series. These two things happened together in this series and it’s very nice,” says Luca Bernabei, producer and CEO of Lux Vide. “I hate Christmas is not a romantic comedy, it is something more. It’s a love comedy. Love comedy – he explains – in the sense that it talks about Love. Family love, brotherly love, love for one’s work. Set in a magical place, in an Italy that is at the same time little told but very iconic, Italy that is reflected in the lagoon between Chioggia and Venice. Physical place, but also of the soul. The canals, the bridges, the houses suspended over the water, just as the lives of our protagonists are still suspended, young women ready to take flight. This is a series of laughs, of tears, of women, of families, of mistakes as big as a house, of shoes and of hope. Of wine. In fact, in Chioggia, which is the city of our series, Christmas is made up of bars where you can drink coffee but also shadows of wine. It is made of cicchetti, small dishes to eat standing up, while chatting. It’s made up of big family dinners where everyone talks over each other. Of shops full of food, of bicycles, of music, of everything that makes Italy ‘the place where we want to be'”.
With this series, Bernabei underlines again, Lux Vide “continues the process of enhancing the small and great treasures of the Italian territory that sometimes we Italians do not know but that the world loves and envies us! Chioggia is the ideal setting for a story about relationships, and it is relationships that give quality to our lives. It is important to always think about it, perhaps with a smile”.
Indeed the locations are indeed one of the main protagonists of the series, which will probably also help the series make its way onto the screens of audiences around the world. In fact, the background to the events of the protagonist Gianna is Chioggia, the town on the water as fascinating and unique as its ‘older sister’ Venice, but more suited to the intimate and familiar atmosphere of the series. An ideal place, in short, to set a comedy of misunderstandings in which it is normal to meet your friends by chance on the street, run into your family members or run into some old flame with whom you would not want to have anything to do. “The setting was initially designed more to pay homage to that territory among the Italians but it would be naive not to think that the beauty of Chioggia and Venice cannot help the series to be appreciated in other territories as well”, Luisa Cotta Ramosino, series director original Netflix.
Not surprisingly, the locations are some of the most evocative places in Chioggia. Thus, Fondamenta Canal Vena, with its portico, is the street that the main characters usually travel, where both Gianna’s father’s delicatessen is located, as well as the fish market and Caterina’s cafeteria where Gianna and her friends meet to chat and toast. While in the background you can see the Bell Tower of San Giacomo and the Church of the Holy Trinity. Two historic buildings in Chioggia hosted the sets of the series: Palazzo Ravagnan Brusomini Naccari delle Figure, where the protagonist celebrates Christmas with her colleagues, and Palazzo Grassi Naccari, where the fictitious hospital where the protagonist works is located. Another key landmark is the Ponte di Vigo, where the statue of the Child Jesus tragicomically falls into the canal. There is no shortage of ‘out of town’ locations: it is the Castello San Salvatore (Susegana, in the province of Treviso), where Carlo, one of Gianna’s suitors, invites the protagonist to dinner to impress her.