The director is Juan Antonio Bayona, a Spanish (Catalan) director who studied directing at a Catalonian film school. He has made several movies, but before The Impossible he was most famous for The Orphanage, a Spanish language horror film made in 2007. The film was a big hit with both public and critics, and is being remade for American audiences.
The Impossible has already broken all box office records in Spain, and looks like being an even bigger hit worldwide than The Orphanage. Critics have also given it mainly very high ratings. It has been made in English using English-speaking actors.
The film is said to show the horrors of the tsunami so effectively that people even fainted at the premiere, Bayona has said that it was important to make it as real as possible rather than trying to soften the experience, so that people who never witnessed the tsunami will have a better understanding of the devastation it created.