"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

The opening line of Gabriel Garcia Márquez's classic 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad), is one of the most famous in literature, and now it's been adapted for the screen.

Netflix announced in 2019 that it would release a TV series based on the acclaimed novel, and the first footage of it starts right at the beginning.

Netflix

One Hundred Years of Solitude is set in the fictional South American town of Macondo, and follows several generations of the Buendía family from their founding of the town to their ultimate fate.

With voice-over narration of the novel's opening line, we see glimpses of other scenes from its first chapters, including family patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendía (Marco González) and his wife, Úrsula Iguarán (Susana Morales), journeying through a dangerous jungle until they find a suitable spot where they can build their home. But this is a story that jumps around in time, so we also get a look at their magical house as it exists later (recognize the influence, Encanto fans?).

One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published in 1967 and soon became a global phenomenon. In The New York Times Book Review, critic William Kennedy called it "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."

Márquez's matter-of-fact presentation of fantasy elements (a gigantic ship discovered in the middle of a jungle, a beautiful young man who is always surrounded by yellow butterflies) mixed with real life (drawn from 20th-century Colombian history and Cold War imperialism in Latin America more broadly) popularized the literary genre of "magical realism."

Directed by Laura Mora and Alex García López, One Hundred Years of Solitude was filmed entirely in Spanish and shot in Colombia with the support of Márquez's family. The series consists of 16 episodes and is set to premiere on Netflix later this year.

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