The ferry to freedom.
Ten years after the premiere of Red Bracelets, one of the biggest global television hits of the last decade, Albert Espinosa returns with another series, also with kids as protagonists and also with diseases as a premise. In this case, it focuses on mental illness and the unfair and poor way in which it is treated among children. But if in Red Bracelets his characters were comfortable in those corridors and rooms of the hospital in which his life passed (inspired by his own experience with cancer as a teenager), in his new series, The hustlers (premiere January 29 on Movistar +), the kids, admitted against their will in a psychiatric clinic, they just want to get out, run, escape, live.
Mickey, Yeray, Guada, Samuel and Lucas They are the five protagonists. Five patients in a leading clinic, located in Menorca, from which they flee before the end of the first chapter of the series. They are the five savvy ones of the title, those who “fight against the rules of the world”, as explained Alvaro Requena, Mickey on the show.** A hustler is “someone who is locked up and feels lost physically and mentally as well,”** he says.
New series by Albert Espinosa.
That is why they dream of traveling. Mickey, specifically, dreams of reaching the Italian island of Ischia, where he lives and his brother works in a hotel. The escape plan from the clinic has that final stop and his four friends and colleagues follow him ready to live the adventure. They don't want to become "emotional wanderers" as Mickey calls all adults who are unable to see beyond their boring routines.
Albert Espinosa has been inspired by his own novel What I'll tell you when I see you again and in “the hustlers”, as they were called and he met in his time in the hospital, boys who were there with mental illnesses and who constantly escaped. A story that he has been wanting to tell for a decade and is now doing it in the form of a road movie, or roads series. "Because Albert is a little traveling ant”, says the producer Guadalupe Balaguer. "He is constantly traveling from here to there and, in particular, Ischia was clear from the beginning that he would appear in the plot."
In Ischia, the end of the road.
As a good road series, it is logistically ambitious, this first season of seven episodes travels between Menorca, Barcelona, France, Germany and Italy. But they couldn't go to all those places. "What we tried was to combine what the script asked for and the possibilities of displacement and budget that we had", continues Balaguer.
Thus, they began with a creative scouting for real places: the south of France, through Bergen-Belsen in Germany and through Ischia. On the way back, photographs in hand, they found closer substitutes for some of them.
the south of France found him in Girona, in Figueres they recreated the station Beziers, for instance. Germany also placed it in Catalonia, in Gualda, “with a great job by the art team”. And Ischia? It's really Ischia. "We were very clear from the beginning that we would go to the island to end the series with the rush of that environment and because Ischia is a paradise," says the producer. They shot there in November 2019, adapted to the dates that the island remains open. And we'll see it the Castle, the views of its charming town and at the Mare Blu hotel, close to the coast.
Minorca.
These hustlers wanting to take on the world start and end on an island. Your trip starts in Menorca. The exteriors of the clinic in which they are admitted is Mallawi House, a spectacular residence, built in the 1920s, opened in 1930, that today is rented as a luxury vacation residence and for weddings and events, 1,500m2 of house and 30 hectares of land, pine and olive trees. On their first run for freedom, the five friends run out the driveway to that house, near Cala Turqueta, Talayer and Son Saura. A landscape that inspires anyone. And from there to ferry that takes them to Barcelona, on the boat they find their first adult accomplice: who gives them the advice that will mark their path, even if they don't believe it: “May you find what you need” , yes, okay, but it is also important “Seek less and let yourself be found more”.
Miki Esparbé goes after the boys.