This Wednesday (8), Star+ presents a preview of its new national production: the “Santo Maldito” series. The dramatic suspenseful production follows the story of Reinaldo, a preparatory course teacher and atheist writer who experiences a great inner conflict: is he capable of working miracles or not? Was he a miracle worker or an imposter?
Soon after, the streamer will release all eight episodes of the first season. With the arrival of the first streaming date, the brings the characters of the plot, among other information. Check it out below.
Synopsis
When Reinaldo’s wife enters a vegetative state, he takes the desperate step to put an end to this suffering, but, by “miracle”, Maria Clara wakes up. He didn’t know it, but it was filmed by a member of a small church in the suburbs. In the eyes of the camera, a divine phenomenon occurred. Samuel, parish priest of a humble church, offers all his savings for Reinaldo to preach to his faithful, believing he is dealing with an enlightened man. On his journey as a religious leader who doesn’t believe in God, the professor shakes his beliefs, discovering truths between heaven and abyss.
Characters:
Below, read the summary of each character, released by Star+:
Reinaldo is 45 years old. He is a writer, a frustrated elementary school teacher, and a staunch atheist, despite being raised Catholic by a fervent mother and conservative father. After being abandoned at the age of eight by his father, Reinaldo drifted away from the faith; at 18, after the Faculty of History, he moved to a shared studio near the Faculty.
He graduated, did a master’s, a doctorate and passed the university competition, becoming a reference in the area. In addition to much prestige, this career has earned him profound vanity. Until he met Maria Clara, he was a promising and respected professor at the university, but after impregnating her at the age of 17, he was expelled from the institution.
He raised a family based on his ideology, making his wife and daughter admire and respect him for his atheistic ideals. After Maria Clara’s near-death experience, all she can do is try euthanasia to end her, her, and her daughter’s suffering.
When she wakes up and Samuel looks for him, Reinaldo begins preaching in a neo-Pentecostal church and, despite having lied to his family and is a pastor who doesn’t believe in God, his vanity – for finally finding an audience that worships him , just like in the early years of teaching – sometimes he speaks louder and gets him involved with Jardim Inês more than he would like.
Reinaldo is chosen without knowing he has been chosen. He furiously denies a transcendence that he does not accept in himself. For him, life is governed by chance: total trust in himself and in man prevents him from realizing that his destiny is guided by the devil.
Samuel is a pastor at Prophets da Fé, a humble little church in a suburban neighborhood called Jardim Inês. Wheelchair-bound and marked in body and soul by his dark and troubled past, Samuel begins to walk a path that he considers successful when he meets Reinaldo. Determined, from the outset, to have Reinaldo remain in his church and to make him a religious leader of a new faith, Samuel will spare no effort to achieve his goals, even if this involves unrighteous paths.
Samuel brings with him the understanding that good can only exist in coexistence with evil, and his idea of having a church with this mentality led by Reinaldo means the establishment of a new faith capable of liberating and revolutionizing people’s spirituality.
The reality is that, deep down, Samuel believes in evil more than good and works in the service of the shadows to achieve his goals of corrupting a holy man. He will never leave the shadow of a frail, insignificant wheelchair user, a good-natured ironic fellow with his own debilitated condition, except in the final events of the season.
Gabriela is only 15 years old, but she is a mature girl for her age, who feels the shock of seeing her family, always so in harmony, in conflict. She sees her father behaving strangely and her mother questioning consolidated certainties at the very moment in which she is forming her own personality.
This involves questions and even challenges to parents, problems at school, drug abuse and violence. Gabriela was trained to be a mini Reinaldo, defiant and materialistic, but she is now as if she has taken possession of her father’s pride, which she manifests in defiance and bullying.
All the mental confusion, revelations and discoveries that are already typical of adolescence are enhanced by the hard journey and explode inside Gabriela. At the end of the season, she will reframe her relationship with her father and with religion.
Maria Clara is a 32-year-old sociology doctoral student. Reinaldo’s pupil as a teenager, her passion for the teacher gave birth to Gabriela. However, even years after the beginning of the relationship, the two follow the same system of teacher and pupil: Maria Clara, unknowingly, lives in Reinaldo’s shadow, hidden in the sea which is her vanity.
He always agrees with what he thinks and says about her and her family’s life. However, after a near-death experience, Maria Clara begins to rethink all aspects of her life, including her relationship with Reinaldo. Her new life will take a path that she would never have imagined taking: while Reinaldo becomes a person she does not know, Maria Clara too approaches her truth about her, through the novel she is writing.
Sonia is a woman subjected to the will of her husband, victim of a violent relationship, who finds in the pastor Rei a means of protection from the violence she suffers almost daily. She becomes not just another member of the church, but a personal follower of Reinaldo. Idolatry soon turns into passion and she betrays her marriage, but not her religious faith: when Reinaldo is threatened by Joyce, she is the one who helps save him, and plays a fundamental role in Reinaldo’s personal trajectory in relation to his Holiness.
Sinval appears at the church seeking his brother Samuel’s forgiveness. He was responsible for driving his older brother to crime and cowardly abandoned him. Samuel pretends to reach out to him, only to disown him and say that God is the one who forgives, which prompts Sinval to seek refuge with Fabinho.
Sinval is a silent fellow and carries an aura of danger and mystery around him. In the eyes of the viewer he is a liar without character who is there to take advantage of his brother’s fragility.
He emerges as a prime candidate for antagonism, however, as certain mysteries are strategically revealed, we shift our perception and conclude that, perhaps, Sinval is the only person in that church with a pure and sincere purpose. After all, Sinval was the one who started this whole conspiracy: he who, after abandoning his brother, fired the shot that almost killed Maria Clara.
Joyce is the religious leader of Jardim Inês. She doesn’t like the rise of the Prophets of Faith with their new miracle worker pastor and she will try to get Pastor Rei to preach at the Tabernacle of the Covenant in Christ. For this she uses the size and exposure of her church as a way to lure Reinaldo through vanity. Bispa Joyce is the antithesis of Samuel: a powerful woman, full of followers, with an established career and social actions spread throughout the community of Jardim Inês.
The actors comment on “Santo Maldito”
In a promotional video, the actors Felipe Camargo, Ana Flavia Cavalcanti, Bárbara Luz, Augusto Madeira and the director Gustavo Bonafé talked about the characters and the plot. “The series is about many things. In addition to religiosity, it also speaks to people’s decision-making in difficult times,” says Bonafé.
“How people manage to go against their values because of the despair they’re in, which sometimes leads to a deeper hole. Which, perhaps, is not a hole, but it is the light”, he completes.
Featured image: Disclosure/Star+
The post “Santo Maldito”: the new national series of Star+ debuts this Wednesday (8); checkout details first appeared on Olhar Digital.
Source: Olhar Digital
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