Bibiana Jimenez Moreno de 200% Media
For Bibiana Jiménez Moreno, Colombian showrunner of 200% Media, residing in Mexico, Calle y Poché: Sin Etiquetas (8×60′), a docu-follow created by Dhana Media (now 200% Media) with the production services of Miracol, for Prime Video, was a special challenge. She was the executive post-production producer of the show.
Jiménez, who has been working in reality shows for 20 years, assured that this genre is the telenovela of the moment. “The challenge with Calle y Poché was to turn it into a docu-follow like The Hills, something never done before in Latin America, basically a soap opera within reality. In the region, it had never been done on any platform, with Colombian talent, showing Bogotá, the landscapes, and the nightlife of Colombia, and normalizing the LGBTQ community; the protagonists are gay and 80% of the talent is within this community,” she said.
She had the support of María Alejandra Rico, with whom she has done several shows to create her own language and structure translated into the first docu-follow in Latin America.
Regarding the LGBTQ issue, Jiménez mentioned that the challenge was to make it normal and balanced, avoiding stigmatizing the sexual preferences of these human beings. “We wanted them to get to know each other and reveal the characters, which is basically what reality shows are about, to see their problems, conflicts, how they grow, what they face, their parents, their families, and especially related to the new generation of Colombian talents in a society that has evolved, that is on the way to inclusion but still have many years to go. That was the great challenge in post-production.”
She highlighted that as a showrunner, she “falls in love with the characters,” and it is difficult to be objective. But the great learning was during post-production, being selective with the stories. “In post-production, I think I was more objective with all the characters; I took care of all, but you have to detach yourself a little so that it is like real life.”
She said they had between 35 to 40 hours of recording per episode (the series has eight episodes) of Calle y Poché. “This is a lot for 40 minutes per episode. It was a challenge to make it normal for the general public, to make all generations fall in love with it, so that whoever saw it would take off the mask and the stigmatization, leave behind all the moral judgments so that people could identify with a Calle, with a Poché, with the Villas, fall in love with the characters as they do in telenovelas – where it bounces from love to hate and suddenly becomes empathy due to a problem of these characters have and growth with it -. Apart from having an artistic career, they are influencers, but beyond that, people fall in love when they know the real stories, the human beings behind the networks, the pretty faces.”
Jiménez highlighted that they took great care with the language used by Calle y Poché to avoid commonplaces. “We sought to extract significant fragments for the series at a narrative level, which would also leave an inclusive message without labels (as the name says), respectful, in such a way that it would open a conversation sometimes difficult in Latin America that would allow the audience to find points of identification beyond the clichés.”
