Mariano Barroso quit choosing Netflix’s Spanish films to make one: El niño

Mariano Barroso

Photo: Eduardo.seligra / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 26, 1959 Barcelona, Spain
Occupation	Film and television director, screenwriter
Awards	Goya · Crystal Globe, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival · 2 Goya (shared)

For fourteen months, Mariano Barroso sat in the chair that decides which Spanish films Netflix pays for. Then he got up and went to make one. El niño, his adaptation of Fernando Aramburu’s novel about the gas explosion that killed fifty children at a school in Ortuella, near Bilbao, is the first feature he has directed in thirteen years, and its release plan reads like a summary of the business he spent six years administering: a short run in Spanish cinemas, then the platform.

That gap between the big screen and the small one is where Barroso has done most of his work, more than his reputation as a film director suggests. Spanish cinema knows him as the Academy president who took the Goya gala on the road. Fewer people outside the industry could name what he has directed since his last feature, because almost all of it was made for television.

He came to the trade through two doors at once. Born in Barcelona on 26 December 1959, Barroso studied film directing at the American Film Institute and the Sundance Institute and theatre directing at Madrid’s Teatro Español and the William Layton laboratory, and he has kept a foot on stage ever since, with productions of El hombre elefante and Patrick Marber’s Closer. He has also taught, as head of directing at the EICTV film school in Cuba and as directing coordinator at Madrid’s ECAM.

His first feature, Mi hermano del alma, premiered at the Berlinale in February 1994: two estranged brothers, one brother’s ex-wife now married to the other, a business trip that slides into violence. It won him the Goya for best new director and the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary. Two years later Éxtasis went back to Berlin in competition, with Javier Bardem as a young man who robs his own family and then talks his way into a theatre director’s house by posing as the man’s son.

Bardem returned for Los lobos de Washington, written by Juan Cavestany, playing a loser who plans to swindle his old boss alongside Eduard Fernández; he also signed on as executive producer with Barroso. Fernández became the director’s most constant actor. He led the Havana-set noir Hormigas en la boca, which Barroso adapted from a novel by his brother Miguel, and turned up again years later in the Netflix interrogation drama Criminal: España.

The hinge of the career is Todas las mujeres. It began as a series for the pay channel TNT, built around Nacho, a cattle vet played by Fernández, who has to face six women with whom he has unfinished business, and Barroso turned the material into a feature with his co-writer Alejandro Hernández. He described it as the portrait of a kind of Spanish man in decline, whose machismo has a lot to do with being unable to tell the truth. The film won the Goya for best adapted screenplay in February 2014, shared with Hernández; Fernández was nominated for best actor and lost to Javier Cámara.

The trophies hide an awkward fact. Barroso’s cinema has rarely found a large audience. Los lobos de Washington, with Bardem and Fernández in the leads, sold 110,706 tickets in Spain. His most decorated film grew out of a television series, and between Todas las mujeres and El niño he made no feature at all. Calling him a film director describes the smaller half of what he has done for the past decade.

The larger half is serious television, much of it written with Hernández. El día de mañana, adapted for Movistar+ from Ignacio Martínez de Pisón’s novel, followed Oriol Pla as an ambitious newcomer to late-1960s Barcelona who drifts into informing for a political-police officer. La línea invisible, also for Movistar+, cast Àlex Monner as Txabi Etxebarrieta and Antonio de la Torre as the police commissioner Melitón Manzanas to reconstruct how ETA’s killings began in 1968. Los Farad, for Prime Video, sent Miguel Herrán into a family of arms dealers on the 1980s Costa del Sol. The common thread is a man who sells himself a little at a time and calls it ambition.

Meanwhile he was running the house. First vice-president under Yvonne Blake, Barroso took over the Spanish Film Academy on an interim basis in April 2018 and was elected president that June. On his watch the Goya ceremony left Madrid: Seville in 2019, Málaga in 2020 and again in 2021 for the pandemic edition hosted by Antonio Banderas and María Casado, and Valencia in 2022, the night the Academy handed its new International Goya to Cate Blanchett. Fernando Méndez-Leite succeeded him later that year.

In December 2022 Netflix hired him as content director for films in Spain and Portugal. He lasted fourteen months. In April 2024 the company confirmed that he was leaving to direct again, and in July it announced what he would direct, for Netflix. ‘I’m delighted to continue my work with Netflix,’ he said, ‘this time from the script and direction of my next film.’ He produces El niño with Rafael Portela, with RTVE and Telemadrid on board.

Aramburu’s novel returns to 23 October 1980, when propane that had leaked into the basement of a school in Ortuella exploded around midday, killing fifty children and three adults. Belén Cuesta plays Mariaje, the mother of one of the boys; Karra Elejalde plays Nicasio, his grandfather, who in the book climbs to the cemetery every Thursday to keep the child company. It is Barroso’s second return to a Basque wound after La línea invisible, this time with no armed group in sight, only grief and a criminal case that was closed without a trial.

Shooting moved through several Basque locations and wrapped in Madrid on 30 June 2025. El niño opens in Spanish cinemas on 13 November 2026 and reaches Netflix on 27 November. For a director who has defended Spanish cinema from the Academy’s podium and then commissioned it for a streaming service, the fourteen days between those two dates are not a footnote. They are the terms of his comeback.

Tags: Javier Bardem, El Niño, La línea invisible, Eduard Fernández, Éxtasis, Mariano Barroso