Exiliados (CAN) is an intimate look into the lives of characters having left their home country to start a new life in the nordic landscape of Quebec.
Producer and director Juan Carlos Garcia, as well as producer and screenwriter Ariel Abrego Gaitan, spoke to Melbourne WebFest about the series.
How important is the message/theme in your series?
We think it’s important to show diversity because everyone deserves to see themselves on the screen and feel identified, also it creates more conversations and empathy.
What inspired your portrayal of trauma and how characters confront it?
The majority of traumas were inspired by our own, our families, and our friends experiences. We wanted to show how our characters could confront those traumas with fear, uncertainty, but also with some kind of hope, strength and determination. What inspired us the most was creating stories and characters that were authentic and honest. Even though our starting point was the exile theme, we also wanted to explore themes like violence, abuse, loneliness and clash of cultures.
Exiliados Trailer
What personal and professional experiences motivated you to create this web-series?
As immigrants and children of immigrants, our personal experiences motivated us a lot. We also had that necessity to be in a creative process and do something concrete. We felt the urge to show the city we live in, a city that looks like us. Professionally, we had a desire to work with diverse actors and artists.
How long have you been working on your series?
We have been talking about creating a project like Exiliados since 2016, but we officially started production in 2017, so it has been 3 years.
What was it like translating your web-series?
It was a long process, because we translated the webseries in three languages (French, Spanish and English), but it was important for us to portray the language mix that exists in Quebec, Canada. We wanted our project to travel around the world.
What was your greatest challenge creating the series?
I think money and time. We started without a budget and only had a couple of weeks to write and coordinate shooting days. We filmed each episode in 1 or 2 days, but we are grateful to the whole Exiliados team who worked hard and were passionate about our stories.
What was your release strategy?
We released the webseries when we had most of our episodes finished. We also built our social media followers by posting different content throughout our filming process in order to have a certain audience number before releasing the first episode.
FOLLOW EXILIADOS