‘The Eternal Memory’ Director Maite Alberdi On Discovering That Poignant Speech from Augusto Connecting His Past and Present

Awards Daily talks to director Maite Alberdi about her bittersweet Academy Award-nominated documentary The Eternal Memory, which follows a couple dealing with Alzheimer’s.

Maite Alberdi’s The Eternal Memory begins with Augusto waking in the middle of the night and asking his wife Paulina questions about his life, many of which he has no memory of, including who she is. Instead of this being a sad and scary moment in the couple’s life, director Alberdi captures the curiosity and humor.

“The first scene was shot by them with their camera,” said Alberdi, “and when I received that material I was so shook. It was unbelievable. It has two things that are perfect. It’s the perfect tone, the tone of the relationship they have all the time. She’s so soft and makes fun. ‘I’m your wife! We’ve been together 20 years!’ It perfectly describes how they deal with the disease, and it also summarizes their life, telling the audience information you need to know to enter into the story.”

Augusto Góngora was a popular Chilean TV personality and journalist who was married to actress Paulina Urrutia for 23 years before he passed away last year. A chance encounter with the couple years earlier led Alberdi to pursue filming their unique love story.

“She was teaching at a university, and she brought him to her work and the people she worked with integrated him. It was the first time that I saw a person with dementia so into society and not isolated from the world. That was very, very special. I felt the love from the couple, that they really enjoyed being together. They don’t view it as a tragedy.”

Alberdi’s last Academy Award-nominated documentary, The Mole Agent, also dealt with the subject of aging and dementia, and Alberdi believes The Eternal Memory is an answer to that film.

“The Mole Agent was about older people with dementia completely alone and isolated from the world. And this is the best example of how we have to deal with illness and dementia, being a society with love. I’m interested mostly in fragility and the stage of life we don’t have the possibility to see and to face. I think cinema is a fabric of experience, and it’s a big opportunity to share these experiences.”

Alberdi thought she was making a love story in depicting the relationship between Augusto and Pauline, but as time passed, she realized it was a film about more than that.

“I realized there are so many things that he always remembered, important things that reminded his body until the end. Those things were historical pains and his love, too, so I realized that I have to make those connections and speak about the story of memory and pain and their relationship in other times.”

One of the ways Alberdi links emotion and memory is through historical clips. Toward the end of the film, footage shows Augusto when he was younger, as a journalist speaking about the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and the importance of memory. It’s startling how his words connect to his current situation.

“It was amazing to find that. It was a big gift. When I received it, it was like he was giving the point of view of the film. It’s from an early ’90s archive after the dictatorship finished, and he’s saying that Chileans have been suffering so much, and they have to build their history of memory through emotions. And that’s exactly what’s happening to him. It’s almost like he’s speaking to himself in the future. It’s very weird. Because he cannot remember the dates or numbers or details, but he can clearly narrate how he lost his best friend, how he was killed and which conditions. That pain is there. You cannot erase the pain of a country, even when you think that memory is lost, it’s always there. It’s a big lesson, what he’s saying and what is happening to him in the present. It’s so connected with that speech.”

The Eternal Memory is streaming on Paramount Plus.