Alejandro Fernando Amenábar Cantos is a Chilean-Spanish film director, screenwriter and composer. He has won nine Goyas—including a Goya Award for Best Director for his 2001 film The Others— two European Film Awards and one Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for The Sea Inside among other honors. He has written the screenplays to all seven of his films and composed almost all of their soundtracks.

The Goya Award for Best Director is one of the Goya Awards, Spain's principal national film awards. The category has been presented ever since the first edition of the Goya Awards. Fernando Fernán Gómez was the first winner of this award for his film Voyage to Nowhere.