Erik Barmack, Hernán Caffiero Talk Colo, Colo, Football Fandom

The 2026 FIFA World Cup, the biggest event in the biggest sport worldwide, will unspool June 11-July 19. It will be made memorable no doubt by not only some matches but its fans. Few movies or series look likely to explain the fan phenomenon with a larger dramatic intensity or social nuance than “Raza Brava.” 

Created, written and directed by International Emmy winner Hernán Caffiero (“The Suspended Mourning”), co-produced by former Netflix international chief Erik Barmack at Wild sheep Content and sold by The Mediapro Studio Distribution, “Raza Brava” was inspired by an image which went round the world: of a man in Colo-Colo’s football stadium drenched in the blood of his best friend whom he has just stabbed. The series asks how that could come about, says Caffiero.

Based on true events, begins in 2000 with Carlos standing drenched in blood in a police cell. Cut to 1981, in a dirt-poor neighbourhood of Santiago de Chile, an adolescent Carlos gets his sneakers stolen by another kid, Clavo. “He’s got to learn to defend himself,” older brother Vladi tells his father. 

Set between 1981 and 2000, and narrated by Carlos, “Raza Brava” charts Carlos’ education in violence, a visceral anti-authority mind-set and love for Colo Colo, the soccer team of Chile’s humblest classes. 

“My father was intelligent but poor and to be poor with a conscience makes you lives between helplessness and bitterness. Football was his only space of freedom,” Carlos relates. Joining the White Claw, Colo Colo’s ferocious hard core supporters, “for the first time, a space belonged to me, I felt respected,” he adds. “We were no longer invisible outcasts.” Colo Colo’s also the source of larger dreams. Winning in 1991, the Copa de Libertadores. Latin America’s club championship,“was seen as a milestone that this town might recover its identity with the definitive sign that ties could change,” Carlos remembers.

They do, but not as Carlos imagines. In the 1990s, as mass worker protests in Chile are diluted by a burgeoning consumer society and Carlos and Clavo rise to become leaders of White Claw by 1996, when the club gives Carlos 2,000 tickets a match to use or sell, it becomes a business with records, magazines, concerts and tickets sales. White Claw’s sense of brotherhood is replaced by a struggle for power, money and prominence. For Carlos it becomes a prison. Despite alienating his wife and baby daughter, it’s one from which it seems he cannot escape.

“The series works on several levels,” comments Javier Esteban, The Mediapro Studio International Director, “There’s a historical part of Chile under and emerging from dictatorship, the union of two of the world’s biggest global passions, as Erik comments, and it’s a series which talks about soccer, but also political transition and family. Another key feature of this series is its realism and authenticity, including the characters.” 

Variety talked to Caffiero and Barmack and in the run-up to the Berlinale Series Market Selects, a 20-series strand at the Berlin Film Festival where “Raza Brava” will make its market debut.

Your series bows in a year of a FIFA World Cup, which is much more than just set of matches…

Hernán Caffiero: Yes, it mixes soccer, social issues and politics. To treat soccer as just spectacle doesn’t really get at its true dimension, what it means in the past and for the world now: the projection of a team’s triumph, the sense of belonging. The quantity of fans who will arrive in the U.S from countries around the world will make them one of its talking points, most surely.

“Raza Brava” captures very well the confluence of personal, the club and even Chile when it comes to Colo Colo. When Colo Colo plays Boca in the 1991 Copa de Libertadores, Latin America’s club championship, “Raza Brava” shows its fans sensing or hoping this could be the the beginning of a new era…

Caffiero: “After Pinochet left power, although the violent repression against the Chilean people came to an end, the sense of a new spring never really reached most people, or the closest they got was with Colo Colo: The triumph of the people, embodied in a football team which for the first time in its history was the best in something so popular and massive as football.”

A victory which was so important because of what happened in 1973…. 

Caffiero: In 1973, Colo Colo got to the final and lost the second play off, where they were robbed, which opened the doors to the darkest part of what happened three months later in Chile. Since that defeat, there’s a permanent link between soccer, society, politics, violence and marginalization, which is found not just in Chile but in South America and places where there’s more poverty and marginalization, such as Morocco or Turkey, Algeria and Naples in Italy. The series turns on that.

You’ve said, Erik, that “Raza Brava” unites the two biggest passions in the world, football and entertainment.… 

Erik Barmack: The world is becoming more global. I can wake up and watch series and a hundred different football matches from a hundred different parts of the world – there’s more noise and more content on YouTube than ever. But when you look at clubs like Colo-Colo, the passion is authentic and global in nature. More than 20 million people watch Colo-Colo or feel some association with the club, and that kind of connection can’t be faked. In a world where there are more and more deep fakes and questions about what content represents, this project – and football itself – taps into something real. It’s one of the few things that truly cuts through on a global level.

One way that series can connect globally is via genre, another by depicting universal emotions. They’re caught in an extraordinarily singular reality in “Raza Brava”…..

Caffiero: Most film, TV soccer titles turn on competition, with winning a title or the life of a specific player but “Raza Brava” turns on social, political identity, a social phenomenon found over the world.

Barmack: Professional football emerged in industrial England, shaped by working-class communities and factory towns. From the beginning, the story of football has been intertwined with social struggle. It looks different today, but that relationship (born out of industrialization) has never disappeared. What Hernán does in “Raza Brava” is something closer to “City of God.” We’ve all seen docuseries about football teams that feel flat because they isolate the club from the social forces around it, and you can’t have one without the other.