The resounding success of the Balearic anti-fascist series that the PP and Vox didn't want us to see

"I observed the Terror I was speaking of on a small island, easy to travel around in one day, with a single stage on a motorcycle. It is as if nationalist Spain [...], reduced to a convenient staircase, had found itself gathered within reach." A right-wing writer, devout Catholic and rabid anti-republican, Georges Bernanos became the unexpected witness and the great international chronicler of Franco's repression in Mallorca during the Civil War, denouncing firsthand the The great cemeteries under the moon, also as a cry of alarm about what could happen imminently in Europe.

The systematized Terror of the coup side in Mallorca that Bernanos describes is the background of Norados, the IB3 production that has been in the news in recent days. The Norats (1936-1949). Two anti-fascists in the Mallorcan mountains (2021), by Mateu Morro Marcé, about the true story of Honorat and Jaume Tries, a father and son from Santa María del Camino, militants respectively of the Communist Party and the Socialist Youth, who escaped repression on the island in 1936, and lay in ambush in the Tramu mountain range for years. Until 1949 they finally fled to Algeria, with the help of other resistance fighters.

The first episode of Norados It premiered normally on March 30th on public television in the Balearic Islands. However, the channel's new director, Josep Codony, who took office on April 8th at the hands of the PP and Vox parties, wanted to kill the series, citing low audience ratings. Therefore, the final two episodes aired back-to-back on Sunday, April 13th. The attempt at censorship generated the opposite reaction to what Codony was seeking. The end of the miniseries set viewership records on Balearic television, reaching an 11.6% audience share.

Norados It's a good example of how to transform a true story from the Civil War into a dramatic fiction for the general public. Without betraying the essence of the story, the series directed by Toni Bestard and Ferran Bex favors a series of melodramatic devices over the political tensions that mark the moment, so the characters are defined more by their emotions than by their ideological militancy. This is even true for the two protagonists, Honorat (Rodo Gener) and Jaume (Toni Gelabert), who are outlined above all by their father-son bond, their capacity for resilience, their loyalties despite everything, and their relationship with violence. That's why Bernat (Toni Pons), the Falangist in love with Catalina (Neus Cortés), Honorat's second wife, subjected to torture by the military coup, isn't entirely disliked either. Meanwhile, Rodrigo Maldonado (Álvaro Triay), the main military leader in the area, is portrayed as a fascist in every aspect of his life, from his imposition of Spanish as a public and private language to the machismo with which he acts as a father and husband.

Norados It will probably remain as the last example of the exemplary policy of producing original series that IB3 has carried out under the responsibility of Andreu Manresa and Joan Carles Martorell, from 2016 until that same year, along with other reference titles such as the indispensable It never snows in the city; Sicily without deaths, adaptation of the novel of the same name by the recently deceased Guillermo Frontera; Mopias, a youth fiction with a fantastic feel, or the successful PepIt is very appropriate that this stage of IB3 closes with a series on the high capacity for anti-fascist resistance of the Mallorcan people.