Overview

• Released on 12 September, the film has grossed more than €2 million in Spain and currently ranks as the year’s seventh highest-grossing Spanish title.
• The drama centers on Cervantes’s 1575 captivity in Algiers and, by the director’s own framing, fictionally explores a possible relationship of favor with Hasán Bajá.
• Amenábar cites period denunciations and accounts about Hasán Bajá to justify the speculative thread, which he presents as a narrative device rather than asserted fact.
• Cervantine scholars and cultural critics have challenged the film’s present-day lens and some aesthetic choices, even as reviews note striking visual sequences.
• A post-screening colloquium with Amenábar is scheduled for 1 October at 19:30 at Barcelona’s Mooby Bosque, and the production was shot largely in Valencia locations and in Seville.