“I feel a knot in my stomach. I wanted to be in many places, but not here. Actor João Reis is in his own skin as cicerone, face and owner of the look of the series with which from this Monday RTP1 ends its evenings at the start of the week, and in this one it sometimes faces the worst in the world and situations it would rather not be in – and it tells the viewer. planet onethe one for which there is no B side and which gives the title to the documentary series that unites the public station with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, is full of problems, but under the theme of sustainability João Reis also wants to show answers. And it’s all connected.
“It’s the greatest richness that I get from this series,” he told PÚBLICO. There are conversations that we have at the end of a nationalist demonstration on Poland Day – where the stomach knots at the extremism of speeches and the violence of ideas – which suddenly intersect with the consequences of the closure of a thermoelectric plant in Germany, which the series covers in another episode. Planet A took him to different countries and different themes. “As I evolved in the series, I realized that everything was connected, the climate change they have a brutal impact at the economic and social level”, lists João Reis.
That’s why the show’s lineup may seem more eclectic than the theme and title suggest: the first episode, airing this Monday at 10:45 p.m., is about climate change; the second, which PÚBLICO has seen, is devoted to democratic institutions and will be broadcast, as it should, on April 25. Then come production and consumption, oceans, water resources, poverty and many others that make up the nine episodes of the series. Which is actually more of a project than just a series, agrees João Reis, who joined RTP and Gulbenkian after designing a show that witnessed this big theme of the century that is climate change, he says, and found there “A person who functions as a species as a host, as a common-sense interlocutor”.
RTP/AFM
The first images of the second episode are deliberately fast – Trump, the wall – and suddenly a pandemic that has stopped everything, João Reis sounding like a documentary on the nature of Sunday mornings. And then everything changes, and we are in Hungary, then in Warsaw, in Poland, witnessing the collapse of yet another full-fledged European democracy. From youth climate strike activists to journalists doing it Fact check in Portugal or in Poland, through the contributions of the political scientist Viriato Soromenho Marques, through the Polish militant grandmothers, each episode takes João Reis on a journey that is intended to be that of the viewer.
“I embraced this program with a lot of surprise and a lot of enthusiasm”, says João Reis, an important recognizable face for involving the public in complex themes, who always tried to keep this relative surprise – he wanted to keep his gaze fresh, as part of the “bare” way possible, knowing the topics in stages. “The great work of this series belongs to the foundation’s journalists, consultants and scientists” who either created the groundwork and research or framed the themes, he says. Led by Jorge Pelicano, who co-directed the film with Inês Rueff, a content team consisting of Catarina Fernandes Martins, Pedro Quedas, Mikhaela Anjos and Sara Gomes created the network for João Reis’ two-year journey, which now goes to the RTP1 and RTP Play screens.
But right at the starting house there was “a firecracker” called the pandemic, which delayed a program scheduled for late 2020 and only now debuting. The pandemic is not only a problem linked to climate change, which opens up fertile ground for the spread of viruses, but “it was an amplifier of other conceptions”, explains João Reis. The theme became the framework in which Planet A is painted, but also a major constraint for the production of At World’s End. Although it has filmed in South Africa, Brazil and is still leaving for India, the series was more focused on Europe due to the travel restrictions brought by covid-19 – Denmark and the Netherlands were other countries visited, in addition to tickets via Lisbon, Porto or Azores.