Cry for me Argentina

Indian TV producers have begun to venture beyond the map of India, in search of new TV serial ideas. For instance, Masaum, appearing on Door...

Indian TV producers have begun to venture beyond the map of India, in search of new TV serial ideas. For instance, Masaum, appearing on Doordarshan, is about NRIs in USA. If you think that is unusual, consider a Russian serial which is the saga of an Argentinian woman who is more like Eva Peron than Eva Peron!

Russian television viewers like Indian couch inhabitants, have long been addicted to serialised soap operas like Santa Barbara. They also had a soft corner for Latin American telenovelas. In the absence of quot;swadeshiquot; serial TV melodramas, they have been forced to put up with badly dubbed foreign serials for many years. Now, it seems, they are at the end of the tunnel, when they will no longer have to suffer through Russian-dubbed episodes of Mexico8217;s The Rich Also Cry or Santa Barbara to get their dose of love, lust and lachrymose longings.

Currently, director Mikhail Bogin and Lenfilm are making a soap opera, Senora claimed to be one of the first Russian soaps in Russian history. The serialis expected to be launched very soon.

Soap operas are a recent arrival to Russian television screens, with the only possible exception of the 12-series Soviet film Seventeen Moments of Spring, which was a hit in 1980s. The film was based on a story about a Soviet secret agent, who worked in the Nazi intelligence service under Hitler.

When The Rich Also Cry and Santa Barbara first hit Soviet television during Gorbachev8217;s perestroika days, Russian viewers were glued to their TV sets. In the wake of the break up of the Soviet Union, these daytime melodramas, in a way, became a source of solace in their suffering.

Although soaps had a wide audience in the country, Russian studios were not in a position of making such soap operas. The lack of funds and sophisticated equipment, forced them to go slow in producing their own soap operas.

In this respect, the production of Senora, is regarded as something of a breakthrough in Russian film and TV history. Senora is the saga of a Russian woman, who rose to EvitaPeron-like glory on the plantations of Argentina. It is based on the life of the female president of the world8217;s biggest vegetable oil company, Molinos, in Argentina. The heroine made her fortune under the name Conchita Molinos 8212; a variation on her Russian birth name, Katya Malina.

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quot;Her story is the story of the quest for identity, which especially appealed to me since it was so closely connected with Russian history,quot; Bogin, explaining why he had chosen a subject so far away from home.

In the story, Georgy Stepanovich Malinin, Conchita8217;s grandfather and a well-known Russian specialist in plant cultivation, immigrated from revolutionary Russia to Argentina, and changed his name to its Spanish equivalent, George Esteban Molinos. His son grew up in Argentina and married an immigrant woman from Hungary. She gave birth to a daughter, Katya.

When Katya was five years old, her parents died and she was adopted by an Argentine family and renamed Conchita. Later, Conchita embarks on a journey of discovery toseek her roots, providing all the elements to sustain an ongoing series. Apart from Moscow and St Petersburg regions, the serial has mainly been shot in Crimea.