Sundance Winner ‘The Eternal Memory,’ Story Of Alzheimer’s And A Couple’s Bonds Of Love, Makes Berlin Film Festival Debut
22.02.2023 - 20:43
/ deadline.com
Doctor Zhivago, Casablanca, Amour. Over the decades, cinema has produced some fictional love stories of enduring beauty and resonance. But for sheer emotional force, even those classics may not rival the true love story told in The Eternal Memory.
Maite Alberdi’s documentary, which made its international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, centers on the remarkable bond between a Chilean couple, the esteemed writer and journalist Augusto Góngora and his wife — an actress, academic, and Chile’s former Minister of Culture, Paulina Urrutia Fernández. They spent many joyous years together before Augusto was diagnosed, in 2014, with Alzheimer’s.
The film begins with a scene shot in the couple’s bedroom in the middle of the night, after Augusto apparently has awoken. Smiling, he introduces himself to his wife. “I’m Augusto Góngora,” he says. “And who are you?” Patiently, lovingly, she replies her name is Pauli. And she explains, “I am a person who has come here to help you remember who Augusto Góngora was.”
Urrutia recorded the moment on a camera affixed to a tripod. “She shot like half of the film,” Alberdi tells Deadline. “I started shooting in 2018 and in 2020 when the [Covid] lockdown started, it was like, what are we going to do? I told Pauli, ‘I will send you a camera and you can shoot anything,’ but I never expected to get good material, really. And the first scene that I received, it’s the first scene of the film. It was like, I cannot believe it, because even if I were there, I could never shoot this in the middle of the night, in the bed. It was an intimacy that only they can shoot.”
When Góngora was first diagnosed, the couple shared the news publicly.
“I read that interview and it was really touching,” Alberdi