“It has been very difficult not only to achieve the dream, it has been even more difficult to maintain the affection of the people. It has been even more difficult to gain respect or make a place for yourself with your own teammates.” These are the words with which David Bisbal (Almería, 1979) opens the feature-length documentary that will arrive on Movistar Plus next Tuesday the 17th and in which the artist reviews his career while preparing for the concert to celebrate his 20 years of career that offered in November 2022 in his hometown.
A few words that advance what we will see next: an artist who looks back to remember who he is and where he comes from. From singing from fair to fair in an orchestra and in a musical talent contest that forever changed the way to fame. Bisbal recalls his time in Operación Triunfo, but also the hostility with which a music industry in crisis receives him and his fight, not only to maintain himself, but to gain credibility within it.
“The central theme of 'Bisbal' is how someone who seems to have achieved success in an easy way because he had to live through a historic moment in the music industry that was OT, had to face a lot of problems that others do not have, which is seem like an intruder in an industry that stigmatized everyone who came out of OT, including someone who today is a world superstar and how he has had to earn that extra respect that other artists have not needed," the director advances. from the documentary Alexis Morante (Sanz: What I Was Is What I Am, Héroes: Silencio y Rock
And in that look back, what do you feel about your time at OT? “Absolute affection and good nostalgia,” Morante responds. “Something similar to what we can feel when we remember the university and the classmates that mark you for life. Another thing is how he feels they treated him afterwards,” the filmmaker specifies. The documentary dedicates a lot of time to Bisbal's time in OT "because it really is a very important core part of his career, especially to tell his story: that of someone who reaches a stratospheric dream at a historical moment in a Spanish society marked by a program that did not exist before.”
Why does Bisbal have the incomparable success that his other teammates have had in different stages of OT? Morante points out two reasons. “One is the enormous talent that he has and the second is his very well-furnished head that has ensured that his career was not cut short.” “He is someone who comes from below who loves his family very much and who is clear about his roots, as demonstrated by the fact that he wants to celebrate his 20th anniversary concert in Almería,” he adds.
The documentary features unpublished archive images of the author of hits such as Ave María or Bulería. Like the first recording of a young Bisbal singing in the family van, images of his time in the 'Expresiones' orchestra in which he performed before joining OT or of his first tours, especially in America. The documentary has also had access to record the reality of his current environment in those days prior to the 20th anniversary concert, from his parents to his children, Matteo and Bianca, and his current partner, the actress Venezuelan Rosanna Zanetti.
The absence of references to the artist's sentimental past is surprising, such as his partners Chenoa and Elena Tablada, mother of his daughter Ella. Were there red lines? "No. His previous love life appears for quite some time and in the way that I think it should appear,” Morante responds. “In this film, we have dealt with the issue of the heart because of how it affects him in his career and in his life” and that translates into “when he has relationships that are very high in the media, like with Chenoa and Elena Tablada, Bisbal suffers a stratospheric harassment of the gossip press like never seen before.”
This harassment affects him to face his career in a different way “and that is what we use it for, not so much to find out why he is leaving his previous relationships.” Morante also highlights that the documentary addresses why Bisbal “finds true love so hard and has it so bad so many times” and in that sense the man from Almería explains on several occasions “that a main objective in his life is to find love and to have a family and that was not achieved until recently and to tell this it is not necessary to say that it went wrong before.”
