“What Remains in the Body”: Maite Alberdi on The Eternal Memory

Oscar nominee and Sundance alum Maite Alberdi (with 2020’s surprisingly lighthearted The Mole Agent, which followed an endearing octogenarian with no private investigative skills on an undercover mission to expose retirement home elder abuse) returned to Park City this year with a much different follow-up. While The Eternal Memory likewise deals with both the joys and indignities of aging, Alberdi trains her lens this time on a dynamic duo who’ve been together for a quarter century, much of it in the media spotlight. Paulina Urrutia was (and still is) an actor and former State Minister, while Augusto Góngora was one of Chile’s most famous TV personalities. A fearless cultural commentator, he had the audacity to spotlight the brutalities of the Pinochet regime and upon its fall build an “archive of memory” so that his fellow countrymen would never forget. The ironic tragedy is that Augusto was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease nearly a decade earlier, which is where Alberdi picks up the baton and camera – following the still madly in love couple on their day-by-day journey into discombobulating territory. A few days after The Eternal Memory’s January 21st World Cinema Documentary Competition debut, Filmmaker reached out to the first Chilean woman to be nominated for an Academy Award to learn all about this latest (Pablo Larraín-produced) project.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.