Lolita, matriarch of a drug clan that speaks Mallorcan

BarcelonaThe dark side of Mallorca's sun and beach tourism. This is what Mallorcan producer Luis Ortas wanted to explore when he launched the project Mallorca Confidential, the criminal thriller directed by David Ilundain, which premieres this Friday with a superb Lolita playing the matriarch of a clan of drug traffickers from a gypsy settlement in Mallorca. Around this multi-layered character, who establishes herself as the leader of the settlement but has her own agenda of interests, the film depicts the ecosystem of police, business, and political corruption that sustains drug trafficking, but above all, a family story of sacrifice and betrayal in which a young gypsy woman (Asia Ortega), the matriarch's niece, must decide her loyalties.

Mallorca Confidential is fiction, but deeply rooted in reality: the Chusa played by Lolita is inspired by Paca, the historic gypsy matriarch of Son Banya who in the 90s became one of the biggest narcos in Mallorca and in Spain until two police operations put an end to her reign. Ortas knows the character well, about whom he already produced a documentary series available on Prime Video. "Paca had a certain media relevance in Mallorca and became an icon for all those gypsy women who, with their men in prison or dead from overdose, carried on the business," explains Ortas.

Ilundain's film, however, moves away from strict facts to offer a free version of the character. "The screenwriter Amèlia Mora [also screenwriter of La infiltrada] and I were clear that it had to be fiction, not a documentary, so we put together a completely fictional story that could play with the keys of the thriller", explains the director, who did not contact Paca at any time, who since 2024 has been in the third degree of penitentiary. Ortas did meet with her. "I went to look for her when she got out of prison to see if we could interview her and collaborate in some way, but she wanted to disappear from the front line of media exposure," assures the producer who, nevertheless, thinks that the film "will please her," Paca, because "she is not judged at any moment" and an attempt is made to understand "who she was, why she was the way she was, and what chances someone has in an environment like hers."

Original Mallorcan version

One of the stylistic choices of Mallorca confidencial is the presentation of the character Lolita speaking in a convincingly Mallorcan accent; it is not the character's usual language, but she uses it in some contexts. Although the voice-over and many dialogues are in Spanish –most of Lolita's, for example–, the predominant language in the film is Mallorcan, as befits a film qualified as a Catalan original version and a beneficiary of special aid for cinema in Catalan with market vocation. Ortas defends the realism of the linguistic portrait. “In Son Banya, Mallorcan may not be spoken because the population there comes from Valencia, but in the Pere Garau area, in the center of the island, there is a gypsy population that comes from Catalonia and speaks Catalan”, he says.

In fact, Lolita herself has family in Mallorca –on her father's side, El Pescaílla– who speak Mallorcan and with whom the actress practiced the neutral vowels of Mallorcan –also with a language coach

–. “There is a tradition of Catalan gypsies who live between Mallorca and Catalonia in which this Catalan and Spanish bilingualism occurs, often with a predominance of Catalan and a closed accent that sounds like Santa Maria –explains Ortas–. The problem is that, like that of the native population, this Catalan is being lost; the decline in the last twenty years has been brutal, because the population has grown by 500,000 people and the majority are not Catalan speakers”.

Lolita was the first choice of producers and director to play the character of Chusa, an idea that was reaffirmed after attending a performance of the monologue Poncia and verifying the “impressive connection” she had with the audience. The character of Lolita in Mallorca confidencial is one of the most complex she has interpreted in cinema. Alongside her, a Catalan actress like Asia Ortega gives her a worthy response, bringing a gypsy musicality to the performance. In the film, her best friend is played, precisely, by Lolita's daughter in real life, Elena Furiase. “She arrived later to the project, and convinced us with the casting test, which she did in Mallorcan,” explains Ilundain. Furiase's character, a gypsy woman who has left the village, is inspired by “three gypsy women who, in the 90s, used to collect all the children from the village and take them to school in a bus provided by the town hall,” explains Ortas. “They went from house to house and dressed them and made them breakfast because, in many cases, the parents were addicted to heroin. We also wanted to talk about them in the film, not just focus on the negative side. In the end, as in any neighborhood community, there are all sorts of people”.