2024-08-16 03:01:00
What happens after death is one of the great enigmas of humanity. Depending on each person’s religious, cultural and spiritual beliefs, the answers are as varied as they are unverifiable. The question of the soul There are no absolute answers, much less if you want to find scientific evidence. Does the soul exist? If it remembers that it does, does it die, or is it immortal and resets its memory after each death to reincarnate in new bodies? These are some of the questions that hover over the plot of Privierthe series with which Luzu TV became the first live streaming channel to premiere fiction content on demand in its programming. An event that is worth analyzing, as it is about a “non-traditional” mediumwho built his audience through his own language, and which has now added a classic format to its proposal.
The arrival of an on-demand fiction – without schedules, to the consumer’s liking – to the most watched streaming channel in the country is no minor fact. In the midst of the realignment of the media systemof new and voracious audiences and of the ways of consuming information and entertainment, the premiere of Privier Luzu TV is a bet that deserves attention. Not only for what it proposes artistically but also for how its audience behaves when a series of six episodes of 50 minutes eachaccustomed to “live” content and the possibility of reacting and participating in what they see immediately. On-demand fiction, which can be accessed since last Tuesday by entering the Luzu TV channel on YouTube, It is a commitment to creating a different type of link between former followers and the content.
In that context, Privier It proposes a narrative that has nothing to do with the themes, rhythm and language of the live programming of Luzu TV, where everything is anecdotal chatter, debate on everyday topics and interviews that barely touch on dense subjects such as politics or economics. This “live” format that attracts hundreds of thousands of young people every day, challenging them in a way that many traditional radio or television programs do not, now adds a fiction that is closer in its rhythm and narrative to the latter than to the medium that produced it, and it offers it for free. Privier It is, perhaps, the content that most eloquently synthesizes the encounter between the universe of the new and the old.
Fiction starring Alberto Ajaka, Viviana Saccone, Claudio Tolcachir and Monica Antonopoulos takes the risk of telling a story close to science fiction, with high doses of fantasy, genres not very common in the Argentine audiovisual industry. Under a careful aesthetic, in which beautiful photography and impeccable period recreation stand out, the fiction focuses on Privier (Ajaka), an astronomy professor who from a very young age was caught by the uncertainty surrounding death and What happens next to the soul of the deceasedHis attraction to the workings of the universe and human life made him a “strange” boy in his childhood, one of those who suffer bullying from his schoolmates or swimming classmates, although nobody or nothing made him change his interests. A boy with a different sensory capacity, with a mysterious father who in the 70s disappears from his house for long periods of time (without much explanation, although with hints of political activism), and a supportive mother who speaks with her silences and lives for him.
This attraction to the way things work leads him, years later, to study astronomy, an area in which he becomes a private university professor. Not even the daily grind of teaching made him abandon the obsession that has always followed him: if souls are immortal, is it possible to recover memories of past lives? Privier tells the adventure of a boy turned professor in his quest to access the memory of his past lives, putting his own existence at risk with the development of an experiment that does not simply allow him to travel in time, but places him in certain past and future situations. The fiction narrates this personal journey that he undertakes to satisfy his obsession, in a plot that takes place in three time periods: the 70s when he is 8 years old, the 90s and the present of the story, close to Privier’s middle age. Even, as the episodes progress, The story opens to a futuristic dimension.
“He who tries to walk without risks is not escaping death; he is escaping life.” voiceover by Leonor Benedettowhich opens and closes each of the six episodes, gives Privier a halo of mystery, in a story in which emotion and intrigue are intertwined in the different times of a conventional tale, but which dares to play with the imagination and the different historical times. Without shying away from dreamlike, extrasensory, even multidimensional elements, Privier It is a song to artistic freedom, performed by a cast that is completed with Diego Castro, Alejo Garcia Pintos and Camilo Rauch.
“It is a series in which the aesthetic treatment was fundamental,” he explained to Page/12 Nicolas Tuozzo, the director of Privier. “We worked with different shades of colour in each period: the 1970s had warmer, beige colours, and as time progressed, they became whiter and bluer, more abstract. Art and light allowed us to work on journeys to Scotland in the 1100s, to the Renaissance in France and to Egypt in 3500 BC. The dreamlike dimension is perceived in the transitions of the journeys of Privier’s souls to other periods, with very peculiar image textures. And finally, we created another fantasy place, decontextualised from day and night, without time, such as limbo, that area that is halfway between life and death, that place where souls go before being reincarnated.”
It is not without paradox, or perhaps it is a symptom of these times: with Privierstreaming channels are starting to offer the fiction content that open TV abandoned a few years ago, in a scenario in which international on-demand platforms monopolized the genre with million-dollar productions. We will have to keep an eye on how the genre develops in these new media, if they find in these channels without a past and willing to explore brand new entertainment options greater spaces for creativity and artistic risk. The response so far is good: the premiere episode of Priviertitled “Bólido”, has already had more than 130 thousand views in the first 36 hours of being available on YouTube. That’s no small feat for an experience that was unthinkable just a while ago.