Can you imagine that a series advised by the National Police and focused on a unit against Islamic terrorism resorted to practices in a dubious legal limbo to build a credible plot?

Do not imagine, because that is precisely the path that the art team of

La Unidad

, the fiction of Movistar + that has just closed the filming of its second season,

has had to take

to develop the explosive devices that the terrorists manufacture and with the who blow themselves up in their attacks in real life.

“You start doing interviews with the Police, but suddenly you find yourself searching the internet for how to make explosives, deleting cookies and switching to private browsing,” says

Javier Le Pera

, specialist at La Unidad in the matter while holding in his hands one of the devices, which could well explode at that moment if it were not for the lack of explosive and that they have developed after a visit to the

deep web

. «If you search in Spanish, hardly any information appears; you switch to English and something else is coming to you, and, finally, you end up turning to Arabic translators, who

open up a world of websites that take a minute to close

because the series is important but not that much, "he says.

Although the objective is to achieve realistic explosives, visual before the cameras and comfortable for the work of the actors, scruples at the moment complicate the process. «We have seen hundreds of models of bombs, some of which were belts that looked like joke items, and in the end

we have designed eight that despite their homemade character do not look like Mortadelo and Filemón

, they kill the same, but they were as if Professor Bacterio had made them », Says Juan Pedro de Gaspar, art director.

Up to that point, these specialists, in addition to Internet searches, have resorted to declassified reports from the CIA on Islamist attacks in Europe and to tutorials that some of the suicide bombers had uploaded to the network.

"We saw a boy who had immolated himself and posted the making-of, trying on the vest and explosives that he had made with gunpowder and small bottles of water," says Le Pera.

Filming of La UnidadMovistar

These everyday materials are the usual ones to create these homemade artifacts, which has facilitated the work of the

La Unidad

art team

, which has also taken as a reference the explosives that were used in the coal mines in Asturias to design the most complex ones. "They are not people with access to high technology, so they make these explosives with fertilizers, gunpowder, gasoline ... If you want to do harm, you have a thousand ways with objects that you can buy in the supermarket," explains Juan Pedro de Gaspar.

During the documentation process, the experts also discovered a form of financing that allows Islamic terrorists to prevent money from moving and card payments from being tracked:

the hawala

. “It is a trusted network to transfer money without physically moving and avoid detection. A person is financing you from Saudi Arabia, but the money is given to you by a person in Spain. The money has not been moved, but a series of documents give proof of this ”, affirm De Gaspar and Le Pera.

This meticulousness in detail is what has distinguished and brought the documentary almost closer to La Unidad since its inception in May 2020, with the focus on an anti-terrorist unit of the National Police.

In its second installment, the plot will turn towards "the personal conflicts" of some characters turned into terrorist targets.

«It will be a season much more contained and close to them, with more thriller and more tension.

Before the good guys had no danger, that has changed ", says director

Dani de la Torre

.

One of the scenes from the second season of La UnidadMovistar

Despite the intimate turn in which the creators have wanted to delve now, the advice of the agents who already collaborated in the first installment to introduce them to their daily work is still present. "We talk to them very often", recognizes

Nathalie Poza

, one of the protagonists. "They come a lot because of the filming, and they even appear in a scene in the background, and it is very comfortable to always have them close here because you can approach and ask them when you have questions about some aspects of the work," complete

Marián Álvarez

and

Michel Noher.

However, the personal factor has not changed the spectacular way of filming characteristic of Dani de la Torre.

"It's his style, that can't be changed," says the series' producer, Fran Araújo.

In fact, during the filming in a school in the town of Chiloeches, on the border between Madrid and Guadalajara, at least

a dozen vehicles

can be counted

, including ambulances, vans or armored vehicles and a hundred people

.

And, even with the pandemic, the team went to a refugee camp in Jordan.

"It was a very powerful experience, there we saw the great sacrifices of the wars in Syria and the jihadists," says De la Torre about a series that will reach Movistar + in 2022.

Will the criminals succeed in cutting off the lives of the agents?

The explosives, at least, are ready.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • HBPR

  • National Police

  • Jordan

  • Syria

  • Saudi Arabia

  • Asturias

  • Europe

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