Marcel Barrena has finished shooting La Roja in Barcelona. The movie is loosely based on true events and has a screenplay written by Barrena himself, together with Alberto Marini, with whom he previously worked on The 47, a feature that scooped five Goya Awards last year, including Best Film.

The film stars Paco León (an actor and director who recently released the smash hit Aída: The Movie in Spanish theatres), Carolina Yuste (a two-time Goya winner, for Carmen & Lola and Undercover), Óscar de la Fuente (Goya-nominated for The Good Boss and La casa), Guillermo Lasheras (The Laws of the Border) and Marc Martínez (seen recently in the feature Balandrau: Where the Fierce Wind Blew), flanked by first-timers Atul Vijayakumar, Kunal Sharma, Yassin El Idrisssi, Bhupinder Singh, Arpit Raj, Sagar Trivedi, Umair Asif and Mihail Chitta.

La Roja introduces us to Mario (played by Paco León), a sports coach faced with an impossible task: leading Spain to victory in its first European Cricket Championship. But Spain is a country with no history of playing this particular sport, and the national team is a complete shambles… However, everything changes when Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi players join the team – for these folks, who work as taxi drivers, delivery people or shopkeepers, cricket runs in their veins. What initially seems to be a last resort ends up totally transforming the team, incorporating various languages and different customs, and causing tensions to run high… But it also forms a new idea of what representing Spain actually means. With no money or sponsors, these players, their coach and a secondary-school teacher (played by Carolina Yuste) will fight for the national pride of a country that has often turned its back on them. And, against all odds, they may well turn Spain into a cricket powerhouse and, perhaps, make it all the way to the Olympic Games.

Marcel Barrena wonders: “Does the Spanish cricket team actually exist? It does now, insists its coach, the captain of a team made up of immigrants in a country that doesn’t always want them - but a country which they will try to take to the Olympics, no less. This story of empathy, ambition, assimilation, cultures and languages [...] first came up when I saw the video of the national anthem being sung by the team during its first competition, the European Championship, in which they came third. Stitching their own clothes, and paying for their kit and for their journeys out of their own pocket, the players stuck their necks out for a country that, despite their triumph, greeted them only with insults and derision.

“La Roja is an ironic title [as it normally refers to the national football team], but it’s one that is deeply meaningful: diverse people, of different races and religions, united by the same cause. And that cause is not cricket or a flag; it’s humanity. This is a film about teams – so much so that we brought together the people from Undercover and The 47 to bring this urban comedy to life with an outstanding cast. It stars some of our best actors and a clutch of new discoveries who will make their mark in the audience’s memories,” concludes the director.

La Roja is a production by Pablo Nogueroles and Mercedes Gamero for the firm Beta Fiction Spain, Tono Folguera for Vilaüt Films, Rosa Pérez and Jaime Ortiz for Atresmedia Cine and La Roja AIE, which boasts the involvement of Atresmedia and Netflix as well as funding from the ICAA. It will hit Spanish cinema screens next year, distributed by Beta Fiction Spain, and its international sales are being handled by Film Factory.