the small sect in the mountains of Catalonia

ARTE – ON DEMAND – SERIES

In the beginning there were a Catholic and musical siblings who, under the name Flos Mariae, supplied YouTube with kitsch video clips. One of them, Amenwhich went viral, aroused in the duo of filmmakers Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, known in Spain as Los Javis, the desire to tell the story of this family, renamed here “Stella Maris”. The satisfaction of this desire produced an imposing series – in its duration, in its scale – which nevertheless never departs from a modesty, from an empathy which keeps both irony and didacticism at bay.

A story of childhoods mutilated by confinement, fanaticism and lies, The Messiah (“the messiah”) looks at the forms that the quest for transcendence takes in the 21st^e century, carefully exploring the shortcomings and wounds of each character. Sprinkled with cinematic references, from Hollywood musicals from the golden age to E.T.attentive to the reality of places and times (the scenario covers several decades), The Messiah is a dense and delicate work that everyone will discover at their own pace. Arte in fact offers it on its platform without broadcasting it on air.

At the center of this universe, there is Montserrat Baro, who we discover in the guise of an attractive and unstable young woman (Ana Rujas) who, in Catalonia in the 2000s, carries around her children, a boy, Enric, and a daughter, Irene, from man to man, from odd job to odd job. Until she meets Pep (Albert Pla), a strict Catholic who locks his wife and children in an isolated building. Far from the world, the family grows, until the daughters born to Pep and Montserrat are numerous and old enough to form a musical group.

The story moves back and forth between eras. The contemporary thread of the story accompanies Enric (Roger Casamajor) who became a cinema cameraman and Irene (Macarena Garcia), who became a seamstress, each engaged in their own way in a settling of scores with the past.

The other side of The Messiah recounts the years spent under the influence of a mother who ended up persuading herself that she was God's spokesperson on earth. It is Lola Dueñas who takes on this messianic avatar, the one who gives the series its transgender title. She does so with a monstrous violence which prolongs and perverts the madness and rebellion of young Montserrat, the directors managing to establish an irrefutable continuity between these two incarnations carried by actresses who are in no way similar.

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