Alejandro Amenábar

Alejandro Amenábar was born in Santiago in 1972 and taken to Spain as a child after Allende's fall. Paul Julian Smith returns, in his archive piece, to an episode at the start of the career: Amenábar failed the narrative section of a course at the film school of the Complutense University in Madrid. The revenge he took at twenty-four was Thesis; the serial killer in it was a professor of media studies, given the name of his own unlucky teacher. Smith puts the film's Spanish audience at about a million and its haul at a run of Goyas. He thinks the best moments of Open Your Eyes are not the Hitchcock quotations but the director's own cold manner: the traffic-choked Gran Vía suddenly empties, a crowded disco goes quiet without explanation. For Smith that manner, and the bond with a young audience, cause discontent in Spanish film circles. For Agora of 2009 the academy's own palmares is exact: seven Goyas went to the film, and Amenábar's own share was the original screenplay, won together with Mateo Gil, while the directing nomination he also held did not turn into an award.