The audience of the series “Nicky Jam: The Winner”, which opens today on Netflix in Latin America and Spain, can hardly imagine the “great challenge” that represented reflecting the “authenticity” of the history of the reggaeton, he says in an interview with Efe its director, Jessy Terrero.
“I think they are going to be surprised by the truthfulness with which we managed to portray the world of reggaeton,” acknowledges the Dominican director of Dominican origin about an audience that wants to know his “reaction” to the work.
Known for his works in the music videos of the leading artists of urban music such as Wisin y Yandel, Daddy Yankee, Don Omar and Maluma among others, Terrero says that making the series was an experience “extremely difficult and therefore very satisfactory”.
“We filmed in Mexico, Medellín (Colombia), Puerto Rico and New York,” the artist explained about this series of 13 episodes whose transmission in the United States and Puerto Rico is at the discretion of Telemundo.
One of the keys of “Nicky Jam: The winner” is the cast, in which there is a “hybrid of very experienced actors, others who are starting and others who are street people”.
“It was difficult to find people who had the physique and attitude of urban life we were looking for,” he argues.
Between the actors of race they are the Puerto Ricans Osvaldo Friger, that interprets to the reguetonero Alberto Stylee, and Essined Aponte, that incarnates to Aleysha, the first love of Nicky Jam.
The reggaeton is played by different people: Avery Rodriguez will play Nicky Jam as a child, while the urban artist Darkiel covers adolescence and the Boston musician himself plays himself in adulthood.
“Another challenge was to create a product in which the audience felt like part of the reggaeton world, with music included, but that did not feel like a long music video”, indicates the father of the idea and the one who took it to Netflix.
The director said that the project is part of his goal of “creating content about Latinos for Latinos,” because he has experienced the impact of “seeing people who look like you” making you see that “it is possible to succeed, even when everything It seems lost and without losing your essence “.
In his opinion, it is something that exemplifies the life of this musician of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, who, after having great success as a reggaeton player in his youth, lost everything and had to start from scratch in Colombia.
The first stage of the career of Nicky Jam, who had to live in poverty and was discovered as a child when he improvised reggaeton lyrics while working in a supermarket, included quick success, thanks to his association with Daddy Yankee.
But the excesses with drugs and alcohol caused a fight between both and his record label. The spiral of self-destruction ended up taking him to jail, and when he left he decided to move to Medellín (Colombia), where he began his return as a star of Latin music.
It is a story of self-improvement with which Terrero was identified, who after working for years in the Anglo-Saxon audiovisual market, finding obstacles after obstacles despite having MTV nominations and other awards, decided to open spaces for Latino creators with his production company Cinema Giants.
“I’m one of the few directors of music videos that has its own company and I opened it because I got tired of being offered projects with a low budget or lower salaries, because I’m Latino or I was doing something for the Latino audience,” he reveals.
He assures that the US market has not realized that Latino creators “have become experts in inventing ways to do things with less resources and to ensure that they do not lose production value”.
However, he is convinced that the success of reggaeton worldwide is having the same effect in the Latin audiovisual industry that hip-hop had in African-American cinema.
The first sample is the decision to bet on “The winner” by Netflix and Endemol, one of the leading television production companies worldwide.
With Endemol he signed a contract to create more content about the reality of Latinos and already works on the documentary series “Under” about the world of reggaeton, in which some of the main exponents of the genre participated, although he did not want to advance their names, and works with rapper 50 Cent in the movie “The Pursuit.” (EFEUSA) .-
