Maite Alberdi after her Oscar nomination: “I hope that I’m opening the road to lots of women directors in Chile”

Original article in Spanish.

The filmmaker talks to Culto on the day of her historic Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary. She evaluates her toughest competitor, previews international projects and details what has most appealed in the United States about her latest film: “The challenge of filming suffering without being melodramatic”.

Maite Alberdi (37) remembers once feeling a similar nervousness to this morning. When Sergio Chamy, her protagonist, just entered the old people’s home where she had been filming for some time, the octogenarian and improvised agent got cold feet. He called his son to tell him he didn’t want to stay on top of the film project and only changed his mind when his family persuaded him to go ahead.

“Just today we remember that as a key moment, that something could happen that changed the course of things,” says the filmmaker, comparing her experience on the set of The Mole Agent with the hours before she found out whether or not her film would get an Oscar nomination.

“We were in the same situation: this is the end of a cycle that we have been working on for many years or it is going to give us new gigantic opportunities. I think that’s how we felt, just like that day,” he says.

The Academy Awards finally embraced her praised feature film and gave her a historic nomination for Best Documentary, the first for a Chilean production for that distinction and the first time that a Chilean director has aspired to a golden statuette. Together with her producer Marcela Santibáñez, she must now set her sights on the upcoming race to try to win the award at the April 25 ceremony.

Although after midday Alberdi declares himself “in shock” that his story – a documentary with noir nods about an infiltrator in an old people’s home – has obtained such an accolade and prefers, at least for one day, to be content with the nomination.

“Before I got to the shortlist, there were 250 documentaries. Then from 250 to 15, that was already euphoria for us. To be among the five, I didn’t expect it at all. Everyone says: yes, it was obvious. No, for me it wasn’t obvious at all,” he says.

His Oscar competition includes the documentary Time (Amazon Prime Video) and two Netflix films, My Master the Octopus and Camp Extraordinary. The latter, moreover, is produced by the Obamas’ company. But it is the other non-American nominee that dazzled Alberdi: the Romanian Collective, about the story of a group of journalists uncovering a laughable political scandal.

“It’s the most shocking documentary I’ve seen in the last year, from the subject matter, the way it was filmed, it’s really impressive,” he says.

Is Collective the big contender to win?

It’s already too much of an award to be there. Collective is a masterpiece for me, it’s really very, very impactful and I wish documentary filmmakers would take on those roles and I wish films like that had the visibility that Collective has. That films with such important denunciations, that generate great changes, have impact and visibility. I only applaud Collective’s two nominations, because it is a film that needed it.

During the Oscar campaign there were several activities to promote The Mole Agent, including a meeting with Todd Haynes (Carol). What do you think has drawn the most attention to the film in the United States?

The behind-the-scenes. A lot of questions about how we made it, about the intimacy of that camera. Especially Todd Haynes and the directors, (they asked about) the challenge of filming suffering without being melodramatic, but with something very abstract, which is loneliness. How do you film loneliness. It’s a very difficult concept to film and not very concrete. Yes, I feel lonely, but in what actions do you see loneliness. In reality it’s even more complicated because you don’t write dialogue for it. So it’s how you capture and build a state from conversations, actions, that pile up little by little. That’s what surprises them or what I’ve heard most as feedback in these conversations with international directors.

As the first Chilean documentary filmmaker to be nominated for an Oscar, what do you think will be the impact of this milestone in Chile and Latin America, especially on other filmmakers?

I think I achieved this because of years of work, a team that worked for years not only on this film. And at the same time because Chilean filmmakers had conquered a place in Hollywood and somehow allowed us to dream and also taught us how to do it. And I think it’s a post and I hope to be opening the way for many Chilean women directors and for many Latin American women directors in the Hollywood industry. I think it’s my role. It’s an industry where we all grow together. I had a hard time believing it was possible, and watching others I believed it was possible.

Will what comes next with The Mole Agent be more intense than the campaign to get the nomination?

I think it was really intense, I think it is to continue in the same model. It was months in which we did not stop working on the campaign. It continues to be international press, working one on one with the Academy in these conversations, so that the film can be seen. The Oscar gives you the option to continue filming, it is to start opening up to other projects. We have projects that we want to film abroad. I think part of the campaign is to internationalize our future productions. We are very focused now on the campaign, but the campaign will probably open many doors for what’s to come.

Would you like your next project to be a documentary outside Chile?

Yes, we want to film ourselves producing but in other places, outside, and we also want to work on series, commissions, international, documentaries. And that’s the fun. As we had ideas in folders, now we can advance more on that.