Alzheimer's and Infinite Memory at Latin American Film Festival

Havana, December 15 (RHC)-- The Chilean documentary ¨La memoria infinita¨, directed by Maité Alberdi and centered on a married couple struggling with Alzheimer's, will be screened today as part of the 44th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana.

 The screen of the 23rd and 12th hall, in Havana's El Vedado, will exhibit this audiovisual competitor in the Latin American Competition and show to the public a work that has become one of the most watched documentaries in the history of Chilean cinema.

The synopsis tells that Augusto Góngora and Paulina Urrutia have been together for 25 years and eight years ago he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, so they both fear the day when he will no longer recognize her.

Are we our memories? If we lose them, do we cease to be? What do we love about each other? Can we live without memory? These are some of the questions that open the moving play.

It is part of the true story of Góngora, known for his journalistic work during the Pinochet dictatorship, and Urrutia, actress and former Minister of Culture in the government of Michelle Bachelet.

The website cinechile reported that Urrutia did not want to make this documentary, despite Alberdi's proposal and the recognition of her previous work, which includes the Oscar-winning ¨El agente topo¨, as well as the feature documentaries ¨Los niños¨, ¨La once and El salvavidas¨.

He did not want a film to be made about the progression of Alzheimer's in his partner, but he was the one who accepted the filmmaker's idea and set out to record the deterioration to which the disease was subjecting him.

His argument was that if as a journalist he could do the same. Let us note that he was a journalist during the dictatorship when he was part of the Teleanálisis team. During the recording process, there were so many people who shared his pain and allowed him to record and broadcast his moments of greatest vulnerability. 

This anecdote from ¨La memoria infinita¨ highlights the human quality that the viewer will encounter throughout the film, the generosity and lucidity of this couple even in the midst of profound fragility, cinechile emphasized.

The text adds that on the other hand, Alberdi's films are known for developing a type of documentary that is profoundly human and, at the same time, aesthetically refined.

The arrival of the pandemic forced the filmmaker to hand over the camera to Paulina Urrutia and work from the home recordings that the actress managed to film.  This transition from the brightness of the pre-pandemic footage to the harsher texture of the amateur recordings also speaks of the difficulty of confinement and its effect on the deterioration of the journalist.

The construction of the audiovisual story gives coherence to this transition, without overemphasizing, but also without taking away the strangeness of those moments, the source summarized.

Among the awards won by the film this year is the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in the United States and the award for Best Documentary at the Stockholm Film Festival in Sweden.

A few days ago it was nominated for the Goya Awards 2024 in the category of Best Ibero-American Film. (Source: Prensa Latina)