Lucia Puenzo
Señorita 89, a series about beauty pageants proposed by Fábula, will premiere on Sunday the 27th on STARZPLAY. However, Lucía Puenzo, writer and director, had always prejudice against that world, she said the show was an excuse to talk about other things. She also confirmed that they are already working on the second season with a team of three Mexican and two Argentine authors.
“Beauty pageants throughout Latin America were very useful for the prominent media outlets in each country, but really they are more an excuse for a political thriller, than for a series about the world of beauty contests, because in that complicity and in that link young and beautiful women represented, was the spearhead of illegal businesses. For me, in the darkest and deepest layers of the contest, was the story. It is like a Trojan horse introduced in a first idea”.
In addition, the show addresses issues such as the objectification of the female body and stereotypes of beauty, along with machismo, which are so current today. “That is why the series begins with one of the characters presenting a thesis about what beauty has meant in the world throughout decades. A theme that goes further back from the 70s and 80s, but before”, she commented.
Puenzo has great ties to Mexico, because she was there as a child when her father filmed Old Gringo, she also has backpacked around the country, filmed countless times and in 2021 she spent half a year living there. “My daughter goes to the garden there and my bond has a piece of my heart, with the advantage of being able to see things with a certain closeness and distance,” she commented.
The group of people with whom she is developing the second season is the same team with which she tends to work with from one series to another. “For example, with the team of authors with whom I worked on season one, we immediately wrote the script for what was my last film, which we shot in Mexico after finishing Señorita 89. We are teams that have known each other for many years. We are very close friends and we know each other very deeply.”
She explained that she works in writers’ rooms that spend a long time in order digging deeper into each character’s arc. “We are all allergic to the sensationalism of what the Americans call the ‘beats,’ which is like the effect blow that series has got us used to, which I find a bit overwhelming when it reaches the extent of lacking any backup like the emotional act of a character” she explained. That is why they spend time studying each character and what happens to them from end to end.
“We’re more driven by the turning points of the character than those of the incidents,” she said, to explain why they work so hard on the scaffolding of the characters. In the particular case of Señorita 89, a choral work, there are leading roles who are ‘monsters with many heads’, but that move together”.
In addition to writing and directing the series, she worked on the final edition, “I run again into the recorded material on the editing island, with three editors who we know each other very well, which allows for a final rewrite of the series, and enabling it to have an authorial course” she commented, after explaining that this series, in particular, found its course in post-production, where they incorporated a voiceover, structure block, among other resources.
About her role as showrunner, she said: “I can’t imagine a series that doesn’t have someone to turn on the light at the beginning and turn it off at the end.”
In addition to filming Dive In (preliminary title) starring Karla Souza and with a group of Olympic divers, with the production company Filmadora, she will soon start another film, as well as two or three series that have been approved this year. She is also working on the development of other projects.
