Night of joy, albeit with a bittersweet touch, for Spain at the International Emmy Awards. The International Television Academy Awards, held Monday, Nov. 24 in New York, produced a handful of winners. The actor Oriol Pla, for his role in Me, drug addict (Disney+) and the documentary #It’sOver, which recounts the experiences of the players of the women’s soccer team after winning the 2023 World Cup and before the scene of Luis Rubiales’ unwanted kiss to the captain, Jenni Hermoso, received two awards. However, finally wild valley AND Return to Las Sabinaswho competed in the same category, best soap opera, lost to the Turks Deha. None of the nominees from Mexico (which started with four nominations), Argentina (with two), Colombia or Chile (with one each) won an award.
Of the 16 categories, Spain was present in three, with four awards. The fifth night on which it could have won an award was for best sports documentary #SeAcabó: Diary of championsfrom the production company You First Originals and broadcast by Netflix, which tells the story of the Spanish women’s soccer team after winning the World Cup and the scenario the champions faced before Luis Rubiales’ infamous non-consensual kiss with his captain, Jenni Hermoso. #It’sOver competed against Argentina ’78from Disney+; Chasing the sun 2South African by T+W; AND SvenBritish, by Prime Video, and won the award.
As its producers, Javier Martínez and Luis Miguel Calvo, told this newspaper, around 4,000 sports documentaries are released every year, a saturated audiovisual landscape, so they wanted to contribute something more and immediately understood that there was a story to tell. They had to fight against twenty production companies to obtain the rights of the players, who were heavily persecuted a couple of years ago. “We have received pressure to limit our creative freedom, censorship in interviews, calls to reconsider the project…”, they reported in EL PAÍS a year ago. “But our aim has been steadfast from the beginning: to give voice to the players’ story, creating a quality audiovisual work that can be distributed globally and thus compensate for the incomplete and disjointed communication from the champions on the events of last year.” This international award certifies that this was exactly the case. Martínez and the director and executive producer of the documentary, Joanna Pardos, accepted the award, surprised and excited, in a hotel in New York.
In male acting, actor and playwright Oriol Pla competed for his role Me, drug addictfrom Disney+, the autobiographical series created by writer Javi Giner, who plays. In his category he competed against Diljit Dosanjh for his role in the biopic Indian Amar Singh Chamkilafrom Netflix; against David Mitchell for the English Ludovico; and against Diego Vasquez for the adaptation of One hundred years of solitudefrom Netflix. In the end the Catalan won. After meeting him, he started jumping and hugging Giner, who was sitting next to him at the table.
Me, drug addictbegan filming in 2023 and tells the recurring journey of entering and exiting addictions of Giner, a boy from Barakaldo who little by little realized his dream of entering the world of cinema until becoming an actor’s agent, and then falling into the world of nightlife and drugs. In 2021 he decided to turn his story into a book, also titled Yo, Addict, which has gone through a dozen editions. When preparations began for his arrival on the screen, he himself asked to be both the screenwriter and the director. “Because I always wanted to be, but also, damn it, I didn’t dare leave my life in the hands of another person,” he said in The weekly country in autumn 2024.
In the same interview, Giner acknowledged that when she saw Pla’s performance and her ability to get under her own skin, she couldn’t help but start to cry. “I remember sitting on the bed, as did the character. Oriol and the first director came in. ‘Oriol, I’m having a regression. I can see perfectly the moment when all this happened’. Oriol, sitting on the floor, took me by the hand and said: ‘Javi, I’m here. We’ll do it between the two of us’. And so it was. I directed the last sequence of the first episode crying. I directed Oriol by the hand, crying. That night, when I got home from filming, I felt there was something, a knot inside me, that untied,” he recalled. Since then, Pla’s performance has received applause and awards in Spain, such as the Actors Union or the Feroz. Now the recognition also reaches outside his country.
The penultimate category of the evening was one of the most anticipated, the telenovela, of which two Spanish women monopolized 50%. Return to Las Sabinasof Diagonal TV and Disney+, faced Savage Valleyby Studio Canal and broadcast on Spanish television, but also on Brazilian television Voice Mania (Crazy about you) and Turkish Deha (The Good and the Bad). This, in the end, won the prize, to the disappointment of the Spanish delegation, which had won until then.
Mexico was left without the award for best actress, which could have gone to Carolina Miranda for the second season of Killer womenfrom ViX; However, it went to Anna Maxwell Martin for the English Until I kill you. Against another Briton, Ludovicohe lost best comedy, for which he was competing And they came at night. It also failed in the unscripted entertainment category for the sixth season of Who is the Mask?because he went to stop Shaolin Heroesfrom Denmark.
For its part, Argentina did not succeed with its short format series for the fourth season of Everything transformsin the short series category, because the Canadian won it The mediator (The Mediator), nor for his sports documentary on the celebration of the World Cup during the dictatorship. Chile also lost the miniseries or television movie award for this one Win or diefrom Amazon MGM, compared to the English Lost boys and fairies. And when Pla won it, Colombian actor Diego Vasquez didn’t mind at all One hundred years of solitude,
