In project
It addresses the rise and fall of the business around the sport of Basque pelota and specifically the specialty of the top basket
For almost a decade, Julio Medem has been announcing his interest in a series entitled ‘Jai Alai’, about the rise and fall of the business around the sport of Basque pelota and specifically the specialty of the top basket, in the United States, where it is never finished to specify. But now this project has taken a new momentum when Zeta Studios, producer of the successful Netflix series ‘Elite’, which will co-produce it with Panamericana Pictures, based in Los Angeles and Mexico City, has taken an interest in him. It was precisely its head, Eva Ruiz de Chávez, who developed this project together with Medem, who announced it almost five years ago, who once again started the project.
«I have been incubating this project of ‘Jai Alai’ for years, it touches me a lot, inside and out, how those Basque pelotaris came to play in America, and saw the sport grow in Miami during the 70s and 80s, when it became the one with the highest volume of bets in the world ”, Medem commented to the magazine ‘Variety’ in Guadalajara, where he received the tribute of the Mexican festival. «’Jai Alai’ came out of a movie that was getting too small for me, because there was too much to tell. So at that moment I knew it was a series ”, the Basque filmmaker acknowledged. «I’m going to take this shoot as if it were a cinema, because I always have a big screen in my way of viewing. Curiously, my films have been seen more on television than in cinema, but I have also been very fortunate that my films have been seen more outside of Spain ”, he revealed.
Planned as a series for a platform (although there is not yet one involved), it will have ten episodes, dialogued in three main languages: Basque, Spanish and English, and its main ingredients will be money laundering, gambling, the sport of the basket tip and family dramas. This international project, with ‘The Godfather’ as one of its main sources of inspiration, will tell the story of Xalba, the patriarch of a Pelota dynasty that transfers control of his empire between sports and dirty business to Ategi, his reluctant son .
After his retirement from professional sports in Miami, Xalba builds a criminal organization, doing business with promoters, gangsters, corrupt politicians, drug dealers and murderers. For his part, Ategi, the best baseball player in the world, lives a tumultuous love story. The father’s bad decisions will end up destroying their lives.
The series will take place for more than three decades, since the 70s, when the Basque tip basket became one of the most profitable sports in the US, at the Miami Jai Alai, an excellent way to launder money with the traffic of cocaine; with its decline in the 80s and its end in the 90s.
Antonio Asensio, from Zeta Studios, affirms that “in the current process of the project there is still no defined cast, but we can confirm that the cast will be international and will be made up of Spanish, Latin American and North American actors.”
If everything goes as expected, ‘Jai Alai’ will be a co-production between Spain, Mexico and the United States, which will begin filming between late 2022 and early 2023, although its Mexican partner, Eva Ruiz de Chávez, estimates that it will not materialize. until 2023.
Medem, parallel to ‘Jai Alai’ is developing “two films and several series, five to specify. The fifth may be based on my novel I wrote in 2012, ‘Aspasia, lover of Athens’. This, however, is not the first time that the television adaptation of this novel has been discussed ». At the end of 2013 it was published that the production company Morena Films was working on this ambitious project, which would mean its landing on television.
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