Chilean director Maite Alberdi really gets elderly people and those with mental health problems. One of her previous works, The Grown-Ups, focused on adults with Down’s syndrome struggling with independence, while her international breakthrough The Mole Agent featured residents of a care home, some with dementia. This latest painfully potent film, The Eternal Memory, carves a snug room for itself in the director’s thematic wheelhouse with its portrait of a Chilean couple, utterly devoted to each other, but challenged by the husband’s progressively worsening Alzheimer’s disease.
At the same time, the film also engages with recent Chilean history, another topic Alberdi has explored previously (see Propaganda, Dios). How could it do otherwise given that the husband, Augusto Góngora, was a broadcaster and journalist who made underground documentaries about the conditions in Chile under Pinochet and edited books about the aftermath? Meanwhile, his partner and eventual wife Paulina “Pauli” Urrutia (they married 20 years after they met, a scene shown here in homemade footage) was an activist, actor and minister of state under socialist president Michelle Bachelet.
