Sonora, among the top podcast platforms in Spain, has tapped leading Chilean scribes Enrique Videla and Paula del Fierro to write a couple of serial podcasts for it. Their credits include Amazon Original “La Jauria” (“The Pack”), showrun by Lucía Puenzo (“The German Doctor”) and produced by Pablo and Juan de Dios Larrain’s Fabula. Both are also co-writers of Movistar’s “Los Prisioneros” and Chilean-German co-production, “Dignidad.”
“We’re delighted to add Chilean creative talent to Sonora. The original content that Del Fierro and Videla will write for our platform will join one of our most outstanding fiction creations, ‘Retornados,’ a science fiction thriller written and directed by Chilean scriptwriter, Julio Rojas,” said Gabriel Sáenz de Buruaga, CEO and founding partner of Sonora. Rojas is also one of the writers on “La Jauria” and the scribe of Spotify’s most successful Spanish-language podcast, “Case 63.”
The first serial podcast, which Videla will write on his own, is “La Dama Blanca,” based on the universal myth of the lady in white, otherwise known as “La Llorona” in Hispanic cultures, of which Guatemala’s Jayro Bustamante made an acclaimed film in 2019.
According to Videla, “La Dama Blanca” will be a terror-police thriller hybrid and be set in Northern Spain.
The second podcast, “Armada,” which they will co-write, envisions a fantasy world where Mexico has won the Mexican-American war of 1846 and Latin America is a world power while the U.S. has devolved into a third world country. The border is always on the verge of conflict and when a macabre crime threatens to destabilize the world order, police officer Agent Erin Burque sets out to solve the crime. Videla cites “Watchmen” and Philip K. Dick’s “Man in the High Castle” among their influences for this podcast.
For Del Fierro, who’s already made one podcast for Sonora, “Desierta Sangre,” working on this format has been a “refreshing” experience, where the challenge is to focus more on the words and the sound design. “You can’t fall back on images to solve narrative issues,” Videla concurred.
Both podcasts will run for 10 20-minute episodes. Del Fierro and Videla will be closely involved in the casting, recording and the whole production process.
“The market is becoming interested in the original and universal stories of Sonora, and is offering us the possibility of turning them into audiovisual fiction series. I think this is very good news for the industry as it continues to expand,” said Sáenz de Buruaga.
Both writers are represented by Constanza Arena’s talent management and project incubator Agencia La Luz. “Personally, at La Luz we love the audio series format. We think they are wonderful pilots to test original stories with the potential for international audiences, made at modest costs but with great quality,” said Arena.
“The most interesting thing is to have done it with a platform like Sonora, which is already synonymous with quality and which allows authors to have an important participation in the sale of audiovisual adaptation rights,” she noted, adding: “It’s something that in these times is extremely encouraging as it also allows the creators and writers themselves to have a voice in the audiovisual adaptation of their content that was initially tested in the sound format, but which was also conceived with a potential for its adaptation.”