(Isaura: Slave Girl) is a 1976 Brazilian telenovela produced by TV Globo, originally broadcast between 11 October 1976 and 5 February 1977. Based on the 1865 novel of the same name by 19th century abolitionist writer Bernardo Guimarães, it tells the story of the struggles of Isaura, a white-skinned slave, to find happiness during the Brazilian Empire. It starred Lucélia Santos in the title role and Rubens de Falco as slave owner Leôncio Almeida, the main antagonist. Women had not the same rights as men. Many of them found in fiction books a scape from sexism and patriarchy in real life.
Brazilian racial classification system, differently from the American one, takes into account only the skin color, not the ethnic background. However, children of slaves were considered slaves by Law. Then, Isaura finds herself in this situation: she is White as Rio de Janeiro's high society, but is threatened as a Black slave as her mother was a slave.
As a big part of novel readers were White women, Guimarães made his book's protagonist to be a white-skinned woman instead of a Black one, as readers could put themselves in the slaves' shoes and understand the unacceptable cruelty of slavery and human captivity.
Escrava Isaura around the world
achieved worldwide success, being broadcast in over 80 countries. According to a research conducted by Good Morning America, it is the most dubbed program in the history of world television. It was a major hit in South America, the Eastern Bloc, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Turkey, countries in Africa, Indonesia, and the People's Republic of China.
Escrava Isaura is one of the only foreign-language telenovelas aired in the United Kingdom, being broadcast on Channel 4 in 1985 as Isaura the Slave Girl. There, it started in a teatime slot on 15 April 1985 and was even coupled at times with musical highlights from Fantástico from 16 April. The run on S4C started on the same day, carrying the previous day's episode at an early afternoon timeslot. The final airing was on 24 May on Channel 4 and the following Monday (27 May) on S4C. It was also the first show broadcast dubbed into Galician when Galician-language channel TVG was launched in 1985.
It was the first telenovela broadcast in Hungary under the title ("Fate of the slaves"). It was picked up by János Horvát, a Magyar Televízió executive, who started the telenovela craze with . According to an urban legend, Hungarian viewers collected money before the happy ending of the telenovela to free Isaura. Later Lucélia Santos visited the country. After the success of the series in Hungary, other communist countries also aired the show. In 1984, it became the most popular program in the history of Polish television, achieving an 81 share.
Lucélia Santos became the first non-Chinese leading actress of a television show broadcast in the People's Republic of China. The Mandarin dub was produced by Beijing Television in 1984. This dub made it to Singapore where it was broadcast by SBC's Channel 8 in 1986, where it gained an original theme song for the Singaporean broadcast, composed by Tony Song, SBC's music director. It was the first soap opera aired in the Soviet Union
The series was also the first telenovela broadcast in Algeria, where it aired under the title (Isaura) dubbed to Arabic in a summer of the 1980s at on RTA. It has been extremely successful in the country at that time, especially among women.
See also
- List of films featuring slavery