The Godó building, headquarters of La Vanguardia, has one of the best views of Barcelona. The film director Ramon Térmens knows this and that is why he has chosen him to shoot some of the scenes for his new film, Black Society, in which "the city is one of the protagonists". The Térmens team settled last Saturday in the offices of the law firm Osborne Clarke, located on the 20th floor, which has magnificent views of the sea and mountains.
"The diversity of the Godó building allowed us to recreate two very different locations. We turned one of the offices, which has a view of the sea, into a Mossos d'Esquadra police station where a sequence takes place that takes place at the beginning of the film" , explains the director, who transformed another of the rooms into "the office of the head of the Chinese mafia."
Because Black Society recounts the attempt of three small-time criminals, Lian, Pardales and El Tracas, to get hold of all the money of the Chinese mafia. "It is not a film of good guys and bad guys, but of the gray areas of human beings," says Térmens in a conversation with La Vanguardia during a break in filming that continued this morning in the Ciutadella park and that in the In the next few days, he will take the team to the three chimneys of Sant Adrià de Besos or to the Port of Barcelona. In total, Societat negra, spoken in Spanish, Catalan and Mandarin, will be shot in 60 different locations.
Térmens took advantage of his visit to the Ciutadella today to score another double. This morning he has recorded one of the first sequences in which the character of Pardales is introduced, played by Daniel Faraldo, who is also a co-writer of the film. Pardales tries to seduce a foreign tourist whose jewelry he wants to steal. In the afternoon, the park has become the setting for the outcome of the film, of which the director keeps strict secrecy.
Societat negra is based on a novel by Andreu Martín with the same title that Térmens fell in love with nine years ago because "the theme of the Chinese triads in Barcelona is very original and Martín had done a great deal of research". "Also, I liked the characters, that trio of losers who decide to steal money from mobsters," he notes. And he adds that "together with Faraldo we wrote the script and gave it a more social touch, making Lian the protagonist."
Lian, played by Alberto Jo Li, is a boy "half Chinese, half Catalan who doesn't quite fit in anywhere, doesn't fully integrate into the city, but they don't let him join the Chinese mafia either." For this reason, he ends up joining Pardales and Tracas, played by David Arribas, in his crazy plan. The cast of Societat negra also includes Chacha Huang and has the collaborations of Abel Folk and María Galiana.
