Packed with panoramic shots of a 1575 Algiers, “The Captive,” from Oscar-winning director Alejandro Amenábar (“The Sea Inside,” “The Others”), weighs in as one of the biggest Spanish movies of 2025 and a broad audience play.
It’s an adventure tale, set over the years from 1575-1580, focusing on “Don Quixote” author Miguel de Cervantes as a young Spanish soldier languishing in an Algiers jail after capture by Ottoman corsairs. There, however, Cervantes (Julio Peña) discovers his power of storytelling. Enthralling both fellow captives and the Bey of Algiers, Cervantes, his spirit unbroken, also imagines a daring escape plan.
“The Captive” feels at time as historical epic, such as in a majestic sweep across the port of Ottoman Empire Algiers, later seen from its highest building, a higgedly-piggedly hotchpotch of favela-like houses, stretching down to the sea.
At others, however, as Amenábar says, it tries to capture Cervantes’ soul. “The Captive” begins with an aged Miguel de Cervantes writing “Don Quixote,” staring at light filtering in onto him through a window, as he searches for inspiration.
Cut to a brutal scene in Algiers, 1575, as he and other prisoners, arriving in the city, are corralled into a patio where the rich are separated from the poor who are sold as slaves, screaming children being torn from the arms of their parents.
The film acknowledges but rises above that violence as Cervantes’ coming of age tale, as a literary genius and one of history’s greatest humanists, schooled by a disciple of Erasmus.
Lead produced by Spain’s Mod Producciones, with Netflix acquiring Spain and select foreign territories, “The Captive” has scored a healthy bevy of pre-sales for Global Constellation, including France with Haut et Court.
“The Captive” will world premiere at Toronto on Sept. 7, followed by a nationwide release in Spanish theaters on Sept. 12. through Disney’s Buena Vista International.
Further pre-sales take in Greece and Cyprus (Filmtrade/Tanweer), Portugal (Nos Audiovisuais), Bulgaria (Pro Films), former Yugoslavia (Discovery) and Encore (Airlines), with buyers circling in North America going into Toronto, Fabien Westerhoff, managing director film, Global Constellation, tells Variety.
“Amenábar crafts a sweeping cinematic epic, tracing the origin story of one of history’s most iconic literary minds against the dramatic backdrop of two colliding civilizations. A bold, immersive adventure made for the big screen, it promises to captivate audiences around the globe,” Westerhoff noted.
Variety sat down with Amenábar before the film’s world premiere at the Toronto Intl. Film Festival.
“The Captive” is your first adventure movie.
Cervantes’ life, especially this period, plays almost like an adventure movie. There are multiple plot twists: He fights for Spain in Italy at the sea Battle of Lepanto. Back in Spain he’s captured by Arab corsairs, suffers five years’ imprisonment in Algiers, where he makes four escape intents.
The film’s also multi-layered.
Yes, I had no intention to make a biopic but I was interested in his sense of humanity. Researching, I discovered that this period was hugely relevant to understand Cervantes as a literary genius and as a person. So the film’s a genre blender: a high adventure, an origins tale, a prison drama and melodrama. I’d almost dare to say that it’s gay drama at one point.
Cervantes’ writings mixes a high-style and an extraordinary realism, in ordinary life detail and colloquial dialogue.
If this were a “Batman” film, it would be a “Batman” origins movie, but here it’s about the man who invented the modern novel. His five years in an Algerian jail, where he witnessed torture, extreme poverty and death, must have been as traumatic as experiencing a 20th century concentration camp. It must have marked him forever.
One of the film’s most memorable scenes has Cervantes given permission to visit the local market. He marvels at its sights, exuberance, bustle and light.
Cervantes’ captivity brought him in contact with Muslim culture. Encountering another world breaks your mental schemes, it enriches. This is seen in Cervantes’ work. He attributes the manuscript of “Don Quixote” to an Arab author. He returns time and again to his experience in Algiers. These five years gives him a sense of humanity and complexity and that can be seen in his characters, especially in “Don Quixote.”
As you’ve said, this is no classic biopic.
I’ve tried to penetrate Cervantes’ soul. This desire for dialogue, of understanding of other people, of friendship can be seen in the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I think Cervantes must have had a profound sense of empathy.
“The Captive” must be the only prison movie with this certain sense of light and optimism.
I wanted that to be in his character, and in some ways in the film. At first, I aimed to underscore the horror of captivity but as the film went on, and Cervantes begins to tell his story about a captive to his fellow prisoners, when the world of the imagination understood as an escape from reality, for me the film begins to acquire a sense of light, which is very Cervantine: This optimism, even in the face of horror.
