If you look at the photos from the 96th Oscar nominees luncheon at the Beverly Hilton earlier this week, you’ll see Chilean director Maite Alberdi there, alongside 178 of the other attendees also in with a chance of awards glory; Greta Gerwig, Steven Spielberg and Emma Stone among them. Alberdi has been nominated for her feature documentary The Eternal Memory (sold by Dogwoof).
It’s the second time in four years that Alberdi has been vying for an Oscar. She was also nominated for The Mole Agent at the 93rd Academy Awards in April 2021. This time round, the experience has been very different. She hasn’t had to deal with all those Covid constraints.
“I am very happy because it is so special for a Latin American filmmaker…I still feel it as very exceptional,” Alberdi says of her latest Oscar run. “And even if it’s my second nomination, it��s my first time in the traditional campaigning mode. When we were with The Mole Agent, it was the pandemic year so everything was online. I never moved from my home until the ceremony which was my only travel that year.”
In hindsight, Alberdi acknowledges that The Mole Agent may have benefitted from the Covid shake-up of normal award routines. It was a low budget independent film. There was no money for a big marketing campaign, but the director and her team took to Zoom to beat the drum for the movie. “It was more democratic because everything was online,” Alberdi suggests.
This year, the situation is altogether different. The Chilean director has a US distributor behind her (MTV Documentary Films and Paramount +) and has already travelled the world with the movie. It has shown in more than 40 countries.
“You, as a filmmaker, you complete the film by listening to the opinions of the people [who watch it],” Alberdi says of being able to experience the film with live audiences. “It’s a ‘learning’ about the film for me to listen, and I didn’t have the opportunity to do that with The Mole Agent.”
The Eternal Memory offers a very gentle and probing examination of the marriage between journalist/author Augusto Góngora and Paulina Urrutia (an actress and former Minister of Culture). They’re a loving couple, devoted to one another, and have been together for more than two decades. But Augusto has Alzheimer’s. His memory is no longer reliable.
The film had its world premiere in Sundance in 2023 where it won the Grand Jury Prize.
What has it felt like for the director to be discussing her film for some 13 months? “My honest opinion?” Alberdi laughs. She is delighted that the film has stayed on the “radar” for so long. “The first months, I learned a lot from conversations with journalists and with the audience. But after three or four months, it started to be very repetitive. As a filmmaker, I wanted to be creative and creating,” she says. “Promotion…it’s not the mood that you need for creation.”
Although she has sometimes missed writing, shooting and editing, Alberdi is quick to add that she also understands that “it is the way to make the film seen. I am lucky that the film was released theatrically in 40 countries. Of course, these are happy problems!”
Augusto, the subject of The Eternal Memory, passed away last summer. “It was very special for her [his wife Paulina’s] mourning because it was in the middle of the promotion for the film,” Alberdi says. She further pays tribute to Paulina’s “bravery” in continuing to accompany the film. “She did many Q&As. She said it was very special because she could share her pain with the audience at a time when people do not want to speak to you because you have lost someone.”
The film, then, helped Pauline deal with her isolation. She was with Alberdi at the Goya awards earlier this month and she will be at the Oscars too.
The Eternal Memory has been credited with enabling people to talk about Alzheimer’s in a new and more open way. Alberdi’s film has moments of humour, lyricism and even happiness. It doesn’t ignore the bleakness of Augusto’s condition but it shows another side too.
“It has been a film that many organisations take,” says Albert. “In Chile, most of them are caregivers’ organisations. They decide to use it mostly because it [Alzheimer’s] is an illness that [causes] most people to be isolated and to not talk openly about the topic.”
What’s more, the documentary shows that it is not only the person suffering from the disease who is isolated: it’s also those who are looking after him or her.
On a lighter note, Alberdi is delighted that a dramatised Netflix English language comedy series based on The Mole Agent is currently in production. It stars Ted Danson as the retired man who goes undercover in an old people’s home on behalf of a private investigator.
Yes, Alberdi is a big Danson fan. She used to watch him in Cheers and other shows. She’s also keen on the work of the scriptwriter and showrunner, Michael Schur (whose credits include The Office and The Good Place).
“I love my film. For me, it’s the perfect documentary but documentaries have so many limits in their humour. There are those things that you cannot do with your characters,” Alberdi, who is an exec-producer on the series, reflects on the liberties the new show will have to ramp up the comedy potential.
As for details about her own directorial projects, Alberdi is non-committal, but concedes she is working on a new English-language documentary. “Is it about older people? Yes,” she answers, but won’t disclose anything further.
The Eternal Memory was produced by Pablo Larraín, her fellow Chilean filmmaker who has several Oscar nominations of his own and whose latest feature, the Netflix-backed vampire satire on Pinochet, El Conde, is up for a cinematography award.
Is this, then, a golden moment for Chilean cinema?
“I think it’s an exciting moment because we have the opportunity to travel with our films. The films have been seen in so many different countries,” she reflects. “We have a cinematography that is so diverse and with so many different voices. I am very proud that we have an industry that respects these different voices. It’s an industry where we are all growing up together.”
