La Mesías

Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi's La Mesías launched on Movistar+ in October 2023 and won the Premio Feroz for Best Drama Series in 2024, along with several more Feroz awards. It confirmed Los Javis as one of the most distinctive partnerships in Spanish prestige television. The duo, who create and direct together, were previously best known for Veneno, their biographical series about a trans life, which had become a major Spanish cultural event in 2020.

Two adult siblings, Enric (Roger Casamajor) and his sister Irene (Macarena García), carry the present-day timeline, which is intercut with long flashback chapters from their childhood and adolescence in a fundamentalist religious household run by their mother, Montserrat (Lola Dueñas, in a career-defining performance). When Enric comes across a viral video on social media of a five-sister Christian-pop act called Stella Maris, he recognises something from his own childhood, and that recognition sets the seven-episode series on its course, part investigation and part emotional reckoning.

It is a family chronicle and a document of religion and politics in contemporary Spain, and also a study of what fundamentalist households pass down from one generation to the next. Dueñas, García and Ana Rujas (as the elder of the Stella Maris sisters) give the performances on which the series' reputation rests. Its mature emotional realism marks a real step on from their earlier Veneno.