GLORIA: The Portuguese Agent
It's called Gloria but it's not a woman's name, it's historical but presents itself as a true thriller, it has international quality but is 100% Portuguese. The first Portuguese series for Netflix, shot in complete secrecy, and Expresso is the first media outlet on a global scale to reveal the production's backstage. The series is almost ready and may change the way the world looks at Portuguese fiction. A strong bet by the American streaming service, it is a Portuguese television project like you've never seen before. It is a character-driven series, centered on an electrical engineer born into a bourgeois family, with a Catholic education based on the values of the Salazar regime and completed his studies and military service in Angola, whose life changes in the former Portuguese colony.
It is still in Africa that João Vidal (played by Miguel Nunes) is recruited by the KGB and, on his return to the mainland, he ends up using his father's political influence to get a job at RARET, the broadcasting center for Radio Free Europe controlled by the United States that existed in Glória do Ribatejo. He knows that his ultimate mission is to destroy the radio antennas, preventing Americans from spreading propaganda to Eastern Europe, but he will have to remain in the shadows and act according to the rules to achieve his goals in Glória do Ribatejo. Is João Vidal a double agent, adding a new layer to the character?
"At a certain point we realize that he also only reports to the Russians what is of interest for him", director Tiago Guedes (the filmmaker also responsible for A Herdade) tells when talking to Expresso. It's something that happens as the character (re) builds up his political position. "He starts by siding with the USSR out of absolute belief, he thinks that communism will be the most efficient weapon against the injustices of capitalism, but during his journey he realizes that both are very similar. He becomes disillusioned with all that power struggle."
The story of Gloria is entirely fictionalized, João Vidal didn't exist and Mia, the Russian telegraphist and KGB agent who disappeared from the radio station, is also a result of Pedro Lopes' imagination, but the historical framework is real and is part of the memory of someone who dealt closely with the Portuguese reality of the Cold War, which has since been forgotten (or never known) by many. But not by Pedro Lopes, whose grandfather was a member of the National Broadcaster. He told him many stories about that time and among the memories there were also those of RARET. It was Transmission Radio, "a real American city created in Ribatejo, set up on a 200-hectare estate", which from the 1950s to the 1990s played "an important role in the Cold War, as part of the American strategy." It was from that gigantic space, "bought by engineer Bívar, with whom my grandfather worked, for the Americans", that the Western and pro-democracy messages were sent to the countries beyond the Iron Curtain, through a relay station. All while Portugal remained hostage to the Estado Novo (Dictatorship). The years passed without Pedro Lopes losing his curiosity about the subject, he was always interested in history and even ended up graduating in it, until the time came to remember it again and shape it as a series, without focusing solely on RARET.
For the screenwriter and producer, it was necessary to show "how Portugal managed international politics with the United States, with the rest of Europe, and with the Eastern Bloc", without forgetting the management of internal politics, the role of the PIDE (political police). "The story was locked away in my notebook for so many years that it only made sense to pick it up when there were conditions to be able to do it well. This interest from Netflix, combined with the other partners, allowed us to have a project with a dimension that is not the norm in the industry", emphasizes Pedro Lopes. "There was the possibility of doing something with a different budget", he adds, without mentioning values. Expresso tried to know the investment involved in the operation, but it remains a secret. It will be high, considering the official numbers of the production.
With more than 150 actors involved (60 are extras), Miguel Nunes is joined by Carolina Amaral, Victoria Guerra, Afonso Pimentel, Adriano Luz, Joana Ribeiro, Marcelo Urgeghe, Sandra Faleiro, Carloto Cotta, Maria João Pinho, Inês Castel-Branco, Rafael Morais and Leonor Silveira in the main roles. Gloria had more than 130 crew members on the set, was filmed in several parts of the country and had about 20 companies involved in the project.
From stuntmen to a piano teacher to a Russian language coach, several specialists were hired to help flesh out the series. It would not be possible to build a series of this magnitude without having historical consultants working with the creative teams. The characters are fictional, but the episodes take place in a sort of timeline, with real events, to guarantee the necessary detail for a top-quality product, on same level as the English period dramas, which serve as an example. Although there aren´t a lot of books on the subject, it was still possible to collect oral information from the people who worked on RARET.
Talking to people who knew that real place in its golden age, which had studios and antennas, housing, leisure areas (with tennis and a swimming pool), and even schools, has proven to be a major asset at a time when the testimonies of those who worked there in the 1950s are becoming scarce. It is a part of history unknown to most, and it was also with surprise that Tiago Guedes realized that there was "such a significant part of a period of our recent history that completely escaped us."
"It's very interesting to know that we had the CIA broadcasting to the Soviet Union there, from Glória do Ribatejo; to discover that all that existed with the utmost secrecy; that those who were there had no real notion of what they were doing", says the now director of Gloria.
FILMING WHERE IT ALL HAPPENED
Tiago Guedes was able to count on real filming locations to shoot a historical series: the houses of RARET are the original ones, they were recovered on purpose for Gloria "a great luck and a great struggle" and there was no studio recording for the series. Finding the ideal locations for filming is one of the biggest challenges for international location managers when preparing a new production, which is why this series also included filming in such different places. "We are talking about a series that has lots of decors, in many different locations. There are between 80 and 90, not counting sub-decors like bedrooms and living rooms", says Tiago Guedes.
The Alentejo town of Cabrela, in Montemor-o-Novo, was chosen as the setting for the Glória village, while the Military Camp of Santa Margarida was used when it was necessary to simulate Angola, and the Short Wave Broadcasting Center, owned by RTP and located in Pegões, Montijo, was the place chosen for the fictional RARET. In the capital, the filming took place in places like the São Jorge Cinema, the airport, the Junqueira Palace, the Prazeres Cemetery, and the Versailles bakery. Everything was thought out in detail to show three very different realities in Portugal in the 1960s: from the Lisbon of the elites to life in the countryside, not forgetting that "American city out of space."
At first Tiago Guedes wanted to film everything inside the original property, not least because "the original building was beautiful inside" but its proportions and the advanced state of degradation it was in made the work impractical, both from a budgetary and time point of view, and that's when the need to find a solution was identified. "I thought the most difficult thing would be to find a place for RARET itself, but in this we were lucky and that space [in Pegões] turned out to be one of the main décors. More difficult was Glória do Ribatejo itself, which I thought would be the simplest. Villages have changed a lot, and finding a place that wasn't out of character proved impossible." Cabrela ended up being the place chosen, but there are modern elements that will have to be cleaned up by special effects. This is something that was already planned. "The biggest intervention will be in post-production", Tiago Guedes assured Expresso.
A PORTUGUESE STORY FOR SURE
The first meeting between SP Televisão and Netflix took place in 2018, and the agenda included making the Portuguese production company known, but film producer Juan Mayne (responsible for the Spanish series Ministry of Time and for films like 7 Years or Fe de Etarras had a more direct question to ask. "What is the project you most believe in and would like to write about?" he asked Pedro Lopes. And if what was at stake was the first Portuguese series for Netflix, he didn't hesitate. "It's Gloria!", and that's exactly the one he went ahead with. "I already had the research very advanced, we had gone to the ICA (Cinema and Audiovisual Institute) for support, we had won and everything was in motion, but from then on it was completely redesigned", he tells Expresso. In January 2019, and already with significant advances in the project, they went to a meeting with Netflix in Miami, in the United States, and got "the green light to move forward." The creative freedom came with a caveat, which Netflix made clear from the beginning: it is not to be like anything else. Differentiation is increasingly important and "nobody wants to see a Spanish series that is the same as an American or a Nordic one", exemplifies the screenwriter and producer.
This is in line with what the American steaming giant of content distribution, present all over the world, defends, which has been one of the main forces behind this sense of giving stage to different ways of telling stories. They really wanted "a Portuguese series, a story that was truly national, that showed the country and that interested the national public", says Pedro Lopes, who doesn't hide the international appeal of Gloria's narrative, which crosses Portuguese history with an international dimension. From Portuguese colonialism (with its similarities and differences in relation to English or French colonialism, for example) "we feel the war deep down," says Tiago Guedes, to the influence of the Cold War, an information war aimed at dissidence and resistance on both sides, there is no shortage of topics for reflection. "There was a 12-month writing job for 10 episodes, plus six months in a rewriting process. Then we had four months of filming. The amount of time there is for the development of a project like this is incomparable", expresses Pedro Lopes, who had close accompaniment from Juan Mayne and Alice Molinari from Netflix who never tried to transform Gloria into something different from what its creator had thought.
"They were asking the right questions during the development of the series. It's important to have feedback in the process, it helps us get to the right place", affirms the screenwriter, who relied on Tiago Guedes when it came time to better close the episodes. The first chapter has already been delivered to Netflix, and the director is now putting together the third, closing a defining set for the success of a production with viewers. "The first three episodes are defining gripping, they're important episodes, and I'm happy with them. I feel they're rounded, they start and end well, they have strong hooks, which is so important."
There are microcliffhangers, we're left with a question (tells the director, challenged to uncover the secrets of success) "I'm too much on the inside to evaluate, but the questions and the endings are there." As Gloria progresses, the siege tightens, both on the KGB and CIA side, and João Vidal's cover is in danger of falling. And if it's early for spoilers, it can already be left assured that this is a series whose ending is, to some extent, open-ended.
"João is someone who can be interpreted as too good, without being moralistic, but over the course of the series we will also manage to soil him. At the end we may even come to the conclusion that we still don't know him", says Tiago Guedes without talking about the possibility of a second season. Nothing is closed, but there seems to be a will to make Gloria a great title on an international scale. This is something that can be perceived not only by the choice of cast, which also includes North American actors, but also in the way some events will be explored – though some flashbacks and dreams of the main character.
If the starting point for Gloria is Portuguese chapter in the history of the last century, the series is being seen as a new page in national production. João Vidal's personal journey reaches the entire world this year.