[3] The novel was adapted into a 1965 Polish-language film, The Saragossa Manuscript (Polish: Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie), by director Wojciech Has, with Zbigniew Cybulski as Alfonse van Worden.

[4][5] The Manuscript Found in Saragossa collects intertwining stories, all of them set in whole or in part in Spain, with a large and colorful cast of Romani, thieves, inquisitors, a cabbalist, a geometer, the cabbalist's beautiful sister, two Moorish princesses (Emina and Zubeida) and others that the brave, perhaps foolhardy, Walloon Guard Alphonse van Worden meets, imagines or reads about in the Sierra Morena mountains of 18th-century Spain while en route to Madrid.

The stories cover a wide range of genres and subjects, including the gothic, the picaresque, the erotic, the historical, the moral and the philosophic; and as a whole, the novel reflects Potocki's far-ranging interests, especially his deep fascination with secret societies, the supernatural and "Oriental" cultures.

Because of its rich and varied interlocking structure, the novel has been favorably compared to many celebrated literary antecedents such as the ancient BCE Jatakas and Panchatantra as well as the medieval Arabian Nights and Decameron.

In 1965, director Wojciech Has adapted the novel into a Polish-language black-and-white film The Saragossa Manuscript (Polish title: Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie), starring Zbigniew Cybulski.

The film was admired by many 1960s counterculture artists, notably Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, who financed a complete print, as well as mainstream figures such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Luis Buñuel.

A later adaption is the Romanian-language play Saragosa, 66 de Zile (Saragossa, 66 Days), written and directed by Alexandru Dabija in 1999 at the Odeon Theatre Bucharest, and first represented at The Theater der Welt festival in Berlin.