Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's acclaimed novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which will be adapted into a web series. The Colombian writer's sons Rodrigo Garcia and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, will serve as executive producers on the show, which will be filmed in Spanish. While the director and cast are still to be announced, Netflix has said the series will be shot mostly in Colombia where the author spent his youth before moving to Mexico.
This marks the first time that Marquez's family has handed over the rights for his work to be adapted on screen in over 50 years.
Rodrigo Garcia, who has directed films such as Nine Lives and worked on TV series like Six Feet Under, said in a statement, "For decades our father was reluctant to sell the film rights to Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) because he believed that it could not be made under the time constraints of a feature film, or that producing it in a language other than Spanish would not do it justice.” Rodrigo Garcia said in a press statement. “But in the current golden age of series, with the level of talented writing and directing, the cinematic quality of content, and the acceptance by worldwide audiences of programs in foreign languages, the time could not be better to bring an adaptation to the extraordinary global viewership that Netflix provides.”
First published in 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the Buendia family, whose patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia, founded the fictitious Colombian town of Macondo.
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