After the bankruptcy miniseries FortuneAlejandro Amenábar (Santiago de Chile, 1972) returns to the cinema with a fiction that recreates Miguel de Cervantes' five years of captivity in Algiers. But The captive, just released in theaters, draws on both historical sources and Amenábar's imagination, who inscribes the story within the prison adventure genre without missing the opportunity to offer his personal vision of the origins of Cervantes' literary and creative impulse.

Long before writing Don Quixote, and after participating in a war between Christian and Muslim forces, Miguel de Cervantes was imprisoned in Algiers. Alejandro Amenábar uses this dark period in the novelist's life to place one biopic A fanciful story that, through a cunning and somewhat deceitful protagonist, emphasizes the magic of storytelling. And so, by telling stories, the character gives moments of escape to his fellow captives and at the same time wins the favor of his captor, as Scheherazade did in Arabian Nights.