The Captive
Alejandro Amenáber won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film two decades ago. The Sea Inside (2004) was his transcendent picture of a paraplegic, played by Javier Bardem, who yearns for death (trailer). It’s sweeping and beautiful. Most recently, he directed While at War (trailer, 2019), which was an official selection at TIFF and centered on an aging academic, keeping his temple of intelligence free from the tyranny of the Spanish Civil War.
Amenáber is now directing a Miguel de Cervantes (writer: Don Quixote) origin story, The Captive. The film centers on 28-year-old Cervantes, a wounded soldier who gets captured by the Ottomans.
Amenáber said:
“In this film, as I have done in my previous ones, I will play with contrasts: between the dark reality Miguel de Cervantes was living and the power of fabulation, between the epic escape attempts and the miseries of captivity, and between the cruelty of his captors and the paradise of the hammam and the joy in the streets of Algiers.”
He continued:
“Miguel de Cervantes experienced all of it, and that is precisely what conditioned the humanism and complexity of his work. It is known that he was already writing at the time, and one of his narratives in Don Quixote, called precisely The Captive, contains numerous autobiographical references. Miguel de Cervantes left a great story untold: his own. It’s time we heard it.”
The film was budgeted at $15M.
Here is the trailer.