When I first meet Maite Alberdi, we are both wiggling our way onto tall stools, her at five feet, me just a couple of inches taller. The confidence with which the director moves, however, towers way above her height. She doesn’t bat an eyelid when I ask her about life post-becoming the first Chilean woman to be nominated for an Oscar with her non-fiction retirement home thriller, The Mole Agent, in 2021: “Not that much has changed. What I do have now is visibility. When you go to the Oscars, everyone asks you what is the next thing.”

The next thing for the filmmaker is The Eternal Memory, a chronicling of the relationship between prestigious Chilean cultural commentator Augusto Góngora and his wife, actress Paulina Urrutia, lovingly together for 25 years, eight of those living with Augusto’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. It was selected for two of the most prestigious festivals in the circuit: the 2023 Sundance Film Festival (where it won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary) and the Berlinale only a few weeks later, where it won the Panorama Audience Award for Documentary. 

Góngora has a wealth of personal archives. A journalist, he catalogued everything. His dark moustache has been featured in news reports and immortalised by Raúl Ruiz; he wrote books, letters and inscriptions. As one of the many living victims of Pinochet’s dictatorship, memory to Augusto is resistance. Love is resistance, too: when Augusto’s memory begins to slip away, love fills its slot. Paulina dotingly massages her husband’s forehead and reads to him as they walk. They dance together, their sweaty palms instinctively finding one another. This love, this tenderness, floods Alberdi’s film.

Patrick Wong fittingly encapsulates.

It was important to understand how to approach the film through the idea of preservation, but for me, the important thing was what Augusto said when pitching his book: we need to mourn, but we can’t spend all of our time looking at numbers and statistics of how many people died. We need to understand the pain and the stories. It’s the same with Covid; the radio keeps repeating the number of deaths and it’s a number, it doesn’t mean anything. What is the story behind that? What is the pain behind that? That is what is important to convey in this case—we need to communicate our emotions. If we ask Latin-American countries about this part of history, they will want to give us hard information. It doesn’t make sense. We have to communicate the pain of history and try to connect and empathize with that.

You’re mentioning the pain and the idea of only being able to fully understand something through understanding the resulting pain. The portrayal of Alzheimer’s is done so beautifully in The Eternal Memory precisely because it doesn’t avoid the pain—it tackles it while understanding it isn’t the whole truth of that lived experience. How did you structure this seesawing between pain and light?
That is life. When you are living in a painful situation, you can laugh. I think I will never tell a story that portrays only one emotion or mood. In documentaries, you don’t have genres—you can’t say it’s a drama, a comedy or a thriller, because in life it is everything at the same time. Of course the pain is there, but you have all these other things, too, and that is the way I live.

I loved being with Augusto and Paulina. When I first met them, I wanted to be their friend. They were having fun all the time despite Alzheimer’s. We had dinner together and, although they are living a struggle, they are so happy together that you just want to watch them and be with them—it was that feeling that they wanted to keep in the film.

I try to shoot characters who I want to be with, and even when they are going through tough situations it doesn’t mean that everything is terrible. It’s the same with The Mole Agent. The story is terrible at the end, but you have a lot of fun during the film because you can see people are having a lot of fun, too. There is no such thing as being in one mood all the time. This doesn’t exist. It is difficult to represent pain, but I never choose to be with characters suffering all the time.

You use the song ‘Burbujas de Amor’ as a theme throughout the film and it’s such a meaningful song for so many Latinos. There’s a poignant lyric about attaching yourself to an illusion so you don’t go into bitterness, which is so, so beautiful. How did the song come about?
This song came back to me because it was a song from the years Paulina and Augusto met. And, of course, it’s an important song for Latin America. I heard that version from Ismael Serrano, the Spanish singer, and I fell in love with it because you can feel the lyrics of the version more deeply. You can feel the love in the song, because that is, at its core, a love song, and it has been misrepresented for so many years.

The song is also filled with intimacy, this idea of wanting to inhabit someone else’s space so you can be with them deeply. It makes me think of the quote written by Augusto as a dedication to Paulina and the idea of memory as courage. I think your film is about love as courage and resistance as courage.
When we found that book and read that line, it was like everything was coming together, the love and the memory and what the meaning of memory was to Augusto. It was a moment where it felt like everything was there. I don’t have parents with dementia and have not experienced dementia in my family life, but being with Augusto and Paulina brought up a lot of questions about relationships and love and the things you , and the things you may not .

It was an exercise on the bigger questions in life. I share the same questions with the audience—it’s a love story where you put yourself in different situations where you are forced to ask questions about the present, the past and the future. To me, this is the gift of the film, to have you asking questions all the time.

One of the most moving aspects of The Eternal Memory is how you dedicate time to understand the power of memory as history, but also to grasp that there is so much to love and appreciate in sharing moments, even if they are fleeting.
Yes, and the important thing about having such a loving life together is that Augusto has always ed Paulina, until now. He’s terminally ill, bedridden, and he still recognises her smell, her voice. So there are some things he can’t communicate verbally, but the body re and memory continues.

I struggle to say he’s lost his memory because he lost his memory as the concept that we understand. But he has never forgotten the friends he lost during the dictatorship; he has never forgotten the pain. He has never forgotten his wife, even if he can’t her name now. He knows that she is his love, he knows that she is his caregiver. Paulina can’t put Augusto in a retirement home or institution because she knows that he knows. This is another way to understand how memory lives in the body in so many different ways.

Your initial conversations with Augusto happened when he was still lucid and could fully understand the project. I wonder if you ever think of The Eternal Memory as a gift to him as much as his preservation work was a gift to others.
Completely, I feel this is a legacy film. His children told me they feel this is a legacy film, too, and I feel that it is so clear that it was his decision to make the film. Paulina says all the time that Augusto’s most impressive act of consequence was agreeing to make this film because he was a person that spent many years talking to people about precariousness and pain. He said, “People opened their houses for me in painful situations; why shouldn’t I open my own house and show my own fragility?” That act of consequence is an act of memory in itself.