For those who enjoy a soap opera, Brazil is fertile ground, as the overwhelming majority of general TV channels in the country transmit, on average, four soap operas daily. Invariably, much of this material eventually goes around the world, being bought and broadcast in other countries. One of the most permeable markets for Brazilian teledramaturgy is, of course, my country, due to its cultural and linguistic proximity. However, I watched "Terra Nostra" only once in my life, which I remember, was the first time it was broadcast in Portugal, around 1997.
The story revolves around a romance between two Italians who end up traveling to Brazil as immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century. In fact, Brazil was a country strongly marked by immigrants, who still play an important role in the economy and culture of that South American country. Portuguese, Italian, German and even Japanese were so important that they constituted considerable immigration waves, that Brazil accepted and mixed in its famous cultural pot. This soap opera, nowadays somewhat forgotten, had a huge melodramatic charge, but this is an almost omnipresent feature in Brazilian soap operas. Being a period soap opera, the re-creation of the sets, the choice of the filming locations and the preparation of the costumes took great care and historical rigor, although the same can not be said of several details of the plot that appeared, at the time, displaced or a bit anachronistic. The cast was very good, but I would emphasize, for the quality of performance achieved, the actors Antônio Fagundes, Raul Cortez, Ana Paula Arósio, Thiago Lacerda e Maria Fernanda Cândido.
