Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, the Spanish director who traded his own stories for a heist

Daniel Sánchez Arévalo

Photo: MiamiFilmFestival / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 24, 1970 Madrid, Spain
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	Seventeen, Cousinhood, Dark Blue Almost Black
Awards	Goya · Málaga Film Festival

For most of his career, the surest thing about a Daniel Sánchez Arévalo film was where it came from. A young man stuck caring for his father, cousins who refuse to grow up, five brothers gathered for a wedding while the whole country watches a football final, a teenager breaking out of a juvenile centre to find his dog. He wrote every one of them, he set many of them in the north of Spain he calls home, and he kept casting the same faces, his own cousin among them. Then a producer asked whether he fancied changing genre, and a director whose films had always come out of his own life said yes to a bank heist he had not imagined.

“I really wanted to get out of my world,” he said when Netflix announced the shoot, “to explore other stories that didn’t come from my head.” The line matters because the film now streaming, Colisión, released internationally as Collision Course, and the one he has already finished shooting, Caza mayor, both rest on material somebody else invented. That is the open question of his career right now: what is left of an author whose signature was his own life once the stories stop being his.

Storytelling ran in the house. He was born in Madrid on 24 June 1970, the son of the illustrator José Ramón Sánchez and the actress Carmen Arévalo, though he likes to say he was born in Madrid “by mistake.” He considers himself Cantabrian through his father’s side, and the coast of Cantabria keeps returning to his films. He took a degree in business studies, the same degree he would later give the hero of his first feature, and by 1993 he was writing television, first for Antonio Mercero’s Farmacia de guardia, later for Querido maestro and Hospital Central.

A Fulbright scholarship took him to Columbia University in New York, where he studied film in 2000 and 2001. Around fifteen short films followed, collecting more than 200 festival prizes. Exprés, conceived for the internet, earned a Goya nomination for best fiction short, and La culpa del alpinista, backed by Julio Medem, screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2004. Another short, Física II, became the seed of his debut feature.

That debut, AzulOscuroCasiNegro (2006), known in English as Dark Blue Almost Black, follows Jorge, a building porter with a business degree who has spent seven years looking after his father since a stroke. It won the screenplay award at the Málaga festival, sold more than 200,000 tickets in Spanish cinemas and brought him the Goya for best new director in 2007. Two of its actors won Goyas the same night: Antonio de la Torre for supporting actor and Quim Gutiérrez as best new actor. Both, along with his first cousin Raúl Arévalo, became the closest thing he has to a company.

He kept that company busy. Gordos (2009) followed a therapy group for people at war with their weight and was shot across more than ten months so the cast could change their bodies on camera; Raúl Arévalo won the Goya for supporting actor. Primos (2011), his first full comedy, was shot in Comillas, on the Cantabrian coast. La gran familia española (2013) staged a wedding on the day of the World Cup final in South Africa and was nominated for the Goya for best film, with Roberto Álamo winning for supporting actor and Josh Rouse for original song.

The trophy count tells a lopsided story. Actors in his films have taken home four Goyas; his own writing was nominated for best original screenplay three times, for AzulOscuroCasiNegro, Gordos and La gran familia española, and lost every time. The only statuette with his name on it is the one for his debut. He also acknowledged that Primos and La gran familia española could not have been made without aid from the government of Cantabria so his warm regional ensembles were never the safe bets they looked like. In the years after 2013 his energy went elsewhere. He wrote a novel, La isla de Alice, a finalist for the Premio Planeta in 2015, and when his next feature-length drama arrived it came through a platform: Diecisiete premiered at San Sebastián in 2019 and reached Netflix two weeks after opening in cinemas.

The streaming years did not change his material at first. Diecisiete, released in English as Seventeen, sent a teenager, his older brother and their grandmother across Cantabria in search of a therapy dog. Las de la última fila, his six-episode Netflix series known as The Girls at the Back, arrived in September 2022 and followed five friends in their thirties on their annual trip, the year one of them is diagnosed with cancer. Rondallas, released in English as Band Together, premiered at San Sebastián in September 2025 and opened in Spanish cinemas on 1 January 2026: a Galician fishing village, two years after a boat sinks, rebuilding itself around a traditional music band. Reviewers took it as his most open embrace of the feel-good film. Cinemanía called it his best attempt yet at the form, El Mundo defended it as popular cinema made without condescension, and Tamar Novas earned a Goya nomination for supporting actor.

Then came the break. Colisión, which Netflix released on 30 October 2026, is set in Madrid during the economic crisis: a gang robs a bank, the getaway ends in a crash, and the crash exposes betrayals among the robbers that began long before the heist. The story came from Ramón Campos, whose Bambú Producciones made the film, and the cast is led by Laia Costa, Karra Elejalde, Luis Zahera, Tamar Novas, Álvaro Cervantes and Lluís Homar.

Caza mayor goes further from home. Shot between January and March 2026 in Fregenal de la Sierra and nearby towns in Badajoz, it adapts El Tigre, the podcast by María Ballesteros and José Antonio de Pascual that won the Ondas award for best fiction podcast in 2025, from their own screenplay. A pig farmer comes home covered in blood claiming he has seen a tiger, and the town has to decide whether he is telling the truth or covering up the theft of three Iberian pigs. Sánchez Arévalo surrounded Antonio de la Torre with non-professional locals and called the result “a western, which is what I’ve always wanted to make.” Warner Bros. Pictures Spain will release it in cinemas in 2027. The story is someone else’s now, but the lead is the actor who won a Goya in his first film, and that may be the clearest sign of what he keeps when he gives the rest away.