PUNTA DEL ESTE, Uruguay -- The setting of the festival seems worthy of a classic Latin American soap opera: a hotel casino on one of South America's swankiest beaches, where the best rooms go for $7,500 a night, where the people look a little too attractive and where understatement seems the one risk deemed not worth taking.
But the first Festival of the Latin American Telenovela might have been better represented by a site with a roomy bicycle rack and killer video game arcade.
Florencia Bertotti plays Floricienta in the popular Argentine telenovela of the same name aimed at teenagers.
(Telefe International)
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After years of enjoying absurd success with adult viewers -- snaring 90-percent-plus shares of prime-time TV audiences in some countries -- expansion means new directions. Such as youthward.
"The telenovela is changing, and the teen telenovelas are the biggest new trend," says Silvana D'Angelo, head of sales and distribution for the Argentine television network Telefe. "In the past year or two, distributors around the world have started looking for teen telenovelas for two reasons: These kinds of programs prepare viewers to watch telenovelas for the rest of their lives, and they can be the basis for lots of licensed products like music CDs, apparel and other products tied to the show."
Telenovelas are derived from U.S. soap operas, but unlike that form the telenovela runs for a limited time, usually about 150 episodes broadcast five or six days a week. Most teen telenovelas are shown at 7 p.m.
After conquering foreign markets in many parts of Europe, Asia and the Middle East, the genre's turn toward the youth demographic caught the attention of the industry executives, actors, screenwriters and directors at the festival earlier this month. When it was time for television companies to showcase recent successes with a series of promotional trailers, the lights dimmed and all eyes focused on a screen that was filled with images of pigtails and primary colors.
It was a promotional clip of "Floricienta," a teen-targeted telenovela that has penetrated Argentina and neighboring countries so deeply it's practically inescapable.
"She only dreams of singing and being happy," the narrator began, as images appeared of a young woman gazing longingly at the boy of her dreams.
"They will fight for happiness until death," the voice-over continued, as an unmistakably wicked-looking woman, identified only as "the calculating stepmother," emerged on-screen.
"Not only will you want to be like Floricienta," the voice said, "you will want to sing like her."
The focus then shifted to two CDs of music from the program, each of which recently reached double-platinum sales in Latin America. Then it moved to the series of live music performances that sold out 50 arenas and led to a tour of Israel. It displayed the weekly magazine that boasts a circulation of 80,000, a line of Floricienta-endorsed shoes, music videos in regular rotation on Spanish-language MTV, cosmetics, games and back-to-school accessories. Finally, it showcased the Floricienta instant-messaging service for cell phones, which recently generated more than a million message transmissions in one month.
When the lights in the room came back on, a generous round of applause broke out. Some said they had glimpsed the future of the genre. Not everyone liked what they saw.
Some saw a lot of flash and little substance, story lines that are abruptly interrupted by songs meant to sell in record stores. Now actors aren't the only ones with the power to steal scenes. Overt product placements can, too.
"I'm worried about the future of the telenovela," says Alvaro Cueva, a television critic from Mexico and the author of a history of telenovelas in Mexico. "In the last 10 years in Mexico, there has been an emergence of telenovelas for kids with a strategy that is entirely commercialistic, and the story isn't the important thing."
That said, the youth-aimed telenovelas follow the same time-tested story formulas strictly observed by their adult-targeted predecessors. The same PowerPoint presentations given during the festival's round-table discussions -- "What Characters Do Audiences Identify With?" or "Where Can You Market Your Program?" -- apply to teen-themed programs. Debates on whether to subtitle or dub, the incorporation of social trends into stories, the telenovela as an educational tool -- these are the universal themes that unite all producers of the genre.
"A good story, told well -- that's what matters," says Alberto Migre, a writer of telenovelas who got his start in radio novelas, the mid-20th-century precursor of the Latin American telenovela. "You can sell shoes or anything else, but it's the story that drives it."
Floricienta is a classic unabashed Cinderella story. It incorporates familiar ingredients -- star-crossed lovers facing long odds, domestic servants who know more than they let on, and a finale that, after countless twists and near-misses, ends with all loose ends tied in a neat bundle.
Argentina's Telefe has produced three teen telenovelas in the last three years, and the spinoff success of the related product lines has provided revenue that can exceed that of the actual program by four or five times, D'Angelo says. That track record has allowed the company to break into the elusive French market, with a bells-and-whistles deal that includes rights to Floricienta and all of its corollary products.
Some telenovela executives are now looking for ways to similarly exploit their adult programming. Argentina's most successful adult-themed program -- 2003's "Resistre," a stylish drama that revolves around human organ smuggling that snagged a 71 percent share -- also featured a hit soundtrack and a line of cosmetics. And for its finale, executives sold tickets to an arena screening, where 3,500 fans could watch the show together.
The growing influence of product placements -- both in teen and mainstream telenovelas -- was the topic of much discussion among screenwriters at the festival. But for a group accustomed to working in a popular art form with haiku-like restrictions, the concerns were often considered, then brushed aside. Even if product placements and teen-themed shows grab a spot in the future, the success of traditional telenovelas guarantees they won't go away.
"I think telenovelas will never change too much," says Victor Agu, a screenwriter who has written several scripts for the international company Televisa. "You will always have the heroine, the hero, the villain, the domestic servant with a secret. But the writer now has to consider scenes where a character might open the refrigerator and say, 'I think I'll enjoy this brand of beer' or 'Isn't this particular newspaper interesting!' But in the end, it's always going be the same result -- a happy ending."
