Netflix sets Oriol Paulo’s Proxies for December 11, after documentaries from Brazil, Mexico and Spain

Netflix will release Proxies, a new thriller from the writer and director Oriol Paulo, on Friday, December 11, and its announcement of November 4 says the film premieres globally that day. Three documentaries from the same corner of Netflix’s slate come first. A Brazilian documentary about Suzane von Richthofen, convicted over the 2002 deaths of her parents, is due on Wednesday, November 11. Diego Enrique Osorno’s portrait of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista movement follows on December 2, and a Spanish investigation into the killing of a banker’s widow on December 4. Netflix announced the four between November 4 and November 9.

Proxies

Netflix lists Paulo’s earlier work as The Innocent, God’s Crooked Lines and The Invisible Guest. In Proxies, a man arrives at a police station on the morning of Christmas Eve and says he has killed two or three people. The harder question, in Netflix’s description, is why he is giving himself up now and what he expects to get from it, and his account soon connects to an older case that had looked settled.

Eduard Fernández, Mario Casas, Blanca Suárez, Nicolás Francella and Alexandra Jiménez lead the cast, with Blanca Parés, Javier Beltrán, Marta Bayarri and Ana Wagener. Paulo wrote the script with Guillem Clua. It is the first production of Juanita Films, the Barcelona company Paulo set up with Libertad Ribera, with music by Fernando Velázquez and cinematography by Bernat Bosch. Paulo says in the announcement that he wanted the suspense to carry “the emotional weight of a tragedy.”

Suzane von Richthofen: O que o Tempo Não Apaga

Netflix describes the Brazilian film as built on interviews with von Richthofen that have never been shown. She was convicted of the 2002 deaths of her parents, Manfred and Marísia, in São Paulo, and Netflix says her last interview was more than 10 years ago. The documentary asks who she has become after serving part of her sentence, and sets that against what investigators established, drawing on archive footage and on interviews with experts and others linked to the case. Lygia M. Barbosa directs with Paulo Gambale Maká. The production company, Kromaki, lists two earlier Netflix titles, Os Quatro da Candelária and Isabella: O Caso Nardoni, and made this one with the co-producer Grama Filmes.

Marcos: Another World Is Possible

Osorno, a journalist and documentary maker, tells the story of the EZLN and the rise of Subcomandante Marcos, whom Netflix calls one of the most emblematic figures of the Zapatista movement. Netflix’s summary dates the Indigenous uprising to 1994 and says the Zapatistas still resist in the mountains of Chiapas. The film draws on more than 5,000 hours of archive material and dozens of interviews, including Marcos’s own words, and was made by the production company Detective.

Who Killed the Banker’s Widow?

The Spanish film reopens the killing of María del Carmen Martínez, widow of the former president of Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo (CAM). Netflix says the case is still a mystery nearly a decade later. The investigation is led by the journalists Braulio García Jaén and Bárbara Ayuso, who made the podcast El enemigo for EL PAÍS Audio and also narrate the film. Maxi González directs, and LACOproductora, part of PRISA Media, produced it.

What the announcements leave open

Netflix’s release for Proxies is the only one of the four that says the premiere is global. The releases for the Brazilian and Mexican documentaries say they will be “only on Netflix,” and the one for the Spanish documentary gives just the premiere date. None of the three lists countries, so US availability is confirmed only for Proxies. None of the four announcements gives a running time or a release hour.