The Battle of the Río de la Plata, fought on its shores on 13 December 1939, will be portrayed in a series of fiction.
Once again, Uruguayan filmmakers and producers show their natural talent and vocation for storytelling. “Graf Spee”, described by its producers as “seven days of honor, love and hell”, will be one of the 12 projects to be presented in the main category of CoPro at the 4th Conecta Fiction, the international television co-production and networking event that will take place on September 2nd and 3rd in Pamplona, Spain.
“Graf Spee” is a production of Coral Cine, a Uruguayan production company that, since its foundation in 2006, has been dedicated to making films based on real and popular stories. Three of its episodes are directed by Coral Cine‘s CEO and director of the documentary “Maracaná”, Andrés Varela and three others are directed by the also Uruguayan César Charlone, nominated for an Oscar for “City of God” and director of the Netflix 3% series.
The writer, journalist and winner of national and international awards, including the Juan Rulfo Award from Radio France International (1995) and the Bartolomé Hidalgo Award (2004), Hugo Burel, devised the original story that inspired the series.
The story begins on the night of 13 December 1939 when the Graf Spee arrives at the port of Montevideo, while two lovers meet in a hotel room. They are the journalist Álvaro Iriarte and the nurse of Jewish origin Sofía Rothman, fictitious characters that will star in the series.
From then on, the wounded Germans will be distributed in the hospitals and the nurse Rothman will have to assist her enemies, while the coffins, covered with the swastika, are lowered from the ship and the funeral procession begins to the Northern Cemetery.
The Government House, the British Embassy in Uruguay, the German Embassy in Uruguay, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Uruguay, the British and Italian hospitals, and the Stock Exchange are some of the locations where the story will take place, which in the words of its director is “a mixture of historical research”, “a twisted narrative thriller of espionage and a psychological study of the characters, which highlights the human complexity”.
