Netflix’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Adaptation to Premiere in December

The first part of Netflix‘s long-in-the-works adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s magic-realism masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, will debut on the streaming service on Dec. 11. There will be 16 episodes total with a second part premiering at a later, as yet unannounced date.

A previously released teaser for the two-season limited series begins with the novel’s iconic first line: “Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” The visuals follow the words, too, moving from Buendía’s fear to the shooters to a flashback of him as a child marveling at the concept of frozen water. The 90-second clip also shows births, people bathing in rivers, and the mysterious scroll that should be familiar to anyone who’s read the book, which came out in 1967.

Filmmakers Laura Mora and Alex García López shot the series, which will follow several generations of the Buendía family as they experience hardship and triumph, in the late author’s home country of Colombia with his family’s support.

“As a filmmaker, and as a Colombian, it has been an honor and a huge challenge to work on a project as complex and that carries as much responsibility as One Hundred Years of Solitude, always striving to understand the difference between the literary and audiovisual languages and to be able to construct images that contain the beauty, poetry and depth of a work that has impacted the entire world,” Mora said in a statement. “We’ve done it with love and respect for the novel, with the support of an exceptional technical and human team.”

“Directing this project has been both a challenge and an adventure; after all, in life, taking risks is necessary to give meaning to what we do,” García López said. “When diving into the adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, my intention was to create something authentic that carries the stature of an international production, because the story deserves it.”

García Márquez, who died in 2014, had been reluctant to sell the film rights to the book during his lifetime. Netflix announced that it would be adapting the novel into a Spanish-language series in 2019.