The culinary genius who won your heart through the senses.
Young Alvar’s surprising ability to memorize (due to his hypermnesia) contrasts with his naïve perception of life. That innocence with which he faces each day shows reality from a different angle that is new and fresh. The events, filtered by his peculiar point of view, turn this story into a frenetic tale, very sensitive towards the world of adults, for example, regarding religion, human condition or sexuality, and with the comicality rarely seen. Alvar is a vibrant, dynamic, funny and brilliant character, but he is also complex and ambivalent. Likewise, the psychological portrait of the rest of the characters is as complex and realistic.
It is the Spain of the 1500s, full of sickness, new discoveries, illiteracy, hunger, economic and political crisis, where Alvar de Mondragón Cepeda is born. His mother dies and his father abandons him, and the people from his village, Oseja de Sajambre, falsely accuse him of having killed his own brother. So he decides to run away knowing something that he will always keep in mind: the world is a hostile and unfair place, and one always has to fight against it.
Alvar runs away from the land of his parents with the spring thaw in search for an owner that can provide him with food and take him away from the violent, dirty and bloody roads. During his odyssey, he gets to meet army men, religious men and politicians, until he finds Father Tomás, who takes him in the Monastery of Sahagún. There, the Father discovers Alvar’s ability to memorize biblical texts, entire prayers in Latin, historical facts and the art of mixing ingredients to provide dishes with an excellent culinary quality.
Alvar grows up and arrives in Valladolid, where the Court was at the time. There, he becomes Juan Pardo de Tavera’s cook, who is none other than one of the most important people within the Spanish inquisition. Alvar’s amazing personality and his exquisite food will drag the attention of both admirers and jealous enemies, who will compare his culinary experiments full of new ingredients newly brought from America with witchcraft.
RELEVANT INFORMATION: Luis Cerezo is a writer, director, and screenwriter, best known for writing and directing the Spanish TV series Los González, which was later adapted by Televisa (and acquired in several countries). He has also worked as a screenwriter on films such as N@ufragos (HBO) and runs his own production company, Cinelibre. In 2015, he published Eo, his debut novel that moved the world.
El Cocinero won the Ciudad Alcalá Prize for Fiction even before it was published, and the author has begun developing it for adaptation into a TV series.
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Film, TV Film.
AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish.
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