ALEJANDRO AMENÁBAR

Born in Santiago de Chile in 1973, Alejandro Amenábar was only one year old when his parents decided to emigrate to Madrid a few days before Pinochet’s coup d’etat. From an early age he developed a passionate love for images and music, and grew up surrounded by VHS tapes that he never tired of watching, like for example Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.

In 1991 he began his studies of Image and Sound at the Complutense University of Madrid, where after meeting another young man named Mateo Gil with whom he shared interests, he directed ‘La cabeza’, his first short film.

It was the second short by the then very young filmmaker that attracted the interest of José Luis Cuerda, who years later would produce ‘Thesis’ (1996), his groundbreaking feature film debut. The film premiered worldwide in the Panorama section of the Berlinale, before reaching the Spanish theaters, where it became the big hit of the season with around one million viewers. It was a huge success both with audiences and critics and earned him seven of the eight Goya Awards that he had been nominated for, including one as Best Film.

A year later, his second feature-length, ‘Open your eyes’, premiered internationally and eventually led to a ‘remake’ starring Tom Cruise retitled as ‘Vanilla Sky’ in 2001. That same year Amenábar stood again behind the camera to shoot ‘The Others’, a film starring Nicole Kidman and selected in Venice which opened him the doors of the international market: boxoffice grosses exceeded $200 million worldwide.

The Oscar and the Golden Globe in 2005 for Best Foreign Language Film bagged by ‘The Sea Inside’ were followed by fourteen Goya Awards and 60 more international prizes.

His filmography also includes ‘Agora’, starring Rachel Weisz, selected for participation in Cannes and the highest grossing film in Spain in 2009, and ‘Regression’, a film that delighted audiences in 2015 featuring Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson in the lead roles. A few weeks ago he presented his seventh and latest feature to date at the San Sebastian Festival: ‘While at War’.