Netflix is putting a series online this week that looks back on one of the most atrocious criminal cases that Spain has ever known. In just 6 episodes, it can become subscribers’ new obsession.
News items are the source of inspiration for numerous fiction films for Netflix. The new Spanish mini-series from the streaming platform is part of a long list of programs inspired by real events, adapting one of the “worst murders” that the Iberian Peninsula has experienced in recent years.
By taking the prism of fiction and not documentary, The Asunta affair returns to the disappearance of a 12-year-old child of the same name. Her adoptive parents first made headlines by becoming the first couple in Galicia to adopt a Chinese child in the early 2000s. In 2013, the young girl was found lifeless on the side of a road in Saint-Pierre. Jacques de Compostela. Analyzes then revealed that she was regularly drugged with a powerful anxiolytic, before being suffocated with a rope.
Her adoptive parents, since divorced, were quickly suspected of having killed her. For investigators, money and greed would be the reasons which pushed them to commit such a crime, despite several gray areas in this case. In November 2015, the adoptive mother, Rosario Porto (who served as honorary consul of France in Galicia before the case) and her husband Alfonso Basterra, who always maintained their innocence, were sentenced by the Galicia Superior Court to 18 years of criminal imprisonment each, for premeditated infanticide.
Asunta’s murder has since hit the legal headlines and deeply shaken Spain for several years. More than ten years later, this affair becomes a Netflix series which describes the dark side of a family and the secrets that can be hidden between the walls of a home. In the casting, subscribers of the platform will recognize, in the role of the two parents, the Spanish actress Candela Peña who distinguished herself in the series Hierro from 2019 to 2021, and the actor Tristán Ulloa, who already appeared in Warrior Nun or more recently Berlin, spin-off of The House of Paper.
Made up of only six episodes of approximately one hour each, The Asunta affair can be seen in full in one weekend, ideal for busy Netflix subscribers looking for a short and punchy program. The series goes online on Netflix this Friday April 26, 2024.