‘Makarras’ Creator David Caiña on His Conecta Fiction SGAE Pitch

It’s 1996 in Bilbao, and adolescent strife reaches a crescendo in David Caiña’s series concept, “Outcasts” (“Makarras”), attending Spain’s Conecta Fiction & Entertainment Market to pitch to industry leaders as part of the SGAE Foundation selections slated for presentation.

The comedy focuses on teens struggling to fit in as their experiences parallel the era’s Basque conflict. Noting a wish to focus on the intimate and interpersonal instabilities of youth, the director will emphasize how those similarities are shared across cultures.

“We have a huge volume of narratives about the conflict in Spain. I don’t fancy that narrative. It looks like the conflict was the center of our lives. It looks, depending on the side telling the story, like there was a ‘good side’ and a ‘bad side,’” Caiña told Variety.

“I want to tell another story. For me, the son of Galician immigrants, the conflict was not the center of my life. The center of my life was that the girl I liked didn’t like me back. It was the F I got in Arts class, the huge tragedy of discovering that my friends were hanging out and nobody called me,” he added.

Music is set to be integral to the eight-part episodic, with the director saying, “Punk music plays a pivotal role in the way teenagers grow up in Euskadi [the Basque Country]. A common place to go on the weekends was and still is the Gaztetxes, self-managed and occupied abandoned spaces where you can participate in workshops and see a punk show.”  

“At the time, we had our own subgenre called Rock Radikal Vasko, which played a huge part in our cultural revolution. Teenagers were divided into Urban Tribes, defined by their aesthetic, defined by the music they listened to.”

Adding, “Not filmmakers or novelists, but punk bands, have been the best at communicating the experience of growing up in our communities.”

Caiña’s previous project, “Past Imperfecto,” developed through SAGE’s Comedy Film Screenplay Writing Laboratory, was a finalist of Ventana Sur’s 2023 Tinta Oscura. His short films have sailed through the festival circuit to acclaim; he concludes that “In the Basque Country, in Spain and the south of France, we lived through a shameful, tragic and gruesome conflict which lasted too long. But, you know what else is shameful, tragic, gruesome and lasts too long? F–king Adolescence.”