The black chronicle returns on Monday nights to TV3 from the hand of Carles Porta but not with a new season of Crims but with Tor, “a unique and unrepeatable series for a unique and unrepeatable story,” the journalist defines it, in the that, during eight chapters, the tragic events that ended with three people murdered in this small town of Pallars Sobirà, in the province of Lleida, are reconstructed.
Porta began investigating the crimes in 1997 for the TV3 program 30 minuts, one of the most watched in the history of the program. Two years earlier, in July 1995, Josep Montané, Sansa, owner of one of the largest mountains in the Pyrenees, had been murdered. It was the third murder in Tor, a town of thirteen houses where the neighbors had been fighting for a hundred years to prove who lived the most days in the town. The reason? The statutes of the co-owners' company said that to own the mountain you had to have a fire burning all year round. It was inevitable that envy and hatred would spread among the neighbors.
With this 3Cat production in collaboration with Goroka, Ikiru Films and True Crime Factory, Porta exposes everything he has been able to find out during the almost three decades that have passed since then. “The series is a metaphor for humanity, with what is good and what is bad,” he tells the journalist, who acknowledges that he himself is “a little more of a protagonist than I would like, but I have been involved in it for 27 years.” this story".
To record the series, archival material, atmospheric shots of the town and more than seventy interviews conducted in the last five years were used. There were many visual elements that served to explain part of the story, but not all of it. There were moments in history that had to be recreated and from there came the idea of building a model of the town of Tor, the work of Eduard Grau, with its houses, roads, cars and with figures of the main characters of the story in the different eras of the story.
Porta highlights the desire for Tor to have its own seal with respect to Crims and in this sense, the model is a clearly differentiating element. “The model is between reality and the story. You believe it a lot and it gives great verisimilitude. I think it will mark a before and after. The dolls in the model are another character in the story.”
The journalist from Lleida, who appears on screen telling the story next to a fireplace, adds more elements that give Tor a different tone. “The fire also symbolizes the act of telling a story near the fire. The soundtrack, with the voice of Roger Mas, creates an incredible atmosphere. It is a sum of small elements that end up having a big role. With all these elements, there is a very clear desire to flee from Crims. Now, the narrator is me, of course; I don't want to and I can't avoid that," admits Porta, who also highlights in the series that some people have been subtitled in Pallarés "as a sign of respect and homage to their way of speaking."
Porta warns that, even if the viewer thinks they know the case from those 30 minutes, the books or the podcast that he has dedicated to this event, “they will not have the feeling that it is a story that they have already seen because each chapter is different and you won't be bored. The world surrounding the crime of Tor is infinite.” The docuseries premieres this Monday night on TV3 and the 3Cat platform and, as confirmed by Porta, negotiations are underway to sell its rights with other platforms.
