La cadena del frío

Synopsis

A mother exchanges coded messages with the manager of a brand of milk through the bar codes on the containers. A father, former militant of the PSUC, builds a Miniature Spain where his dreams as a youth are fulfilled. Lola, the daughter, writes a letter to a brand of crips. In summary, a family tries to lead a normal life. But what happens if the mother’s message is deciphered? If the father constructs the ideal country? If the brand of crisps responds to Lola’s messages?

Through a work interview with Mr McCain, the McCain potato chips man, Lola transits the road from childhood to adulthood. The election victory of José María Aznar is the starting gun: the youthful dreams of the communist father, the hope of the mother placed in a definitive change of course, and the projects of Lola, having decided to construct her life taking as a model the supreme taste of McCain potato chips, will gradually melt to leave a puddle right at the limits with reality.

What if Lola was that flavour that had to come, the ultra-frozen happy face that starts to melt after a break in the cold chain?

La cadena del frío is a journey hand in hand with the savage marketing of food products in the 1990s to understand how they became inoculated into the lives and desires of those of us who grew up under their protective wrap… until the crisis of 2008. Where did all those dreams of the middle classes end up floating? If the dream of reason produces monsters, what do the dreams of the nineties produce?

This work won the Calderón de la Barca National Award 2020.