Maite Alberdi: the triumph of non fiction

The director of La once is one of the best known faces of the national documentary genre. Today, as she prepares the premiere of Los niños, her next film, she explains the current scenario of this genre.

When Maite Alberdi (33) presented in 2011 her documentary El salvavidas (The Lifeguard), in which she tells the story of the life of someone from El Tabo beach, whose maxim is never to enter the water, her grandmother could not go to the premiere because she had a meeting with friends with whom she had been meeting once a month for sixty years. After that, she decided to start filming this women’s ritual, at first sporadically, then more regularly, until after five years, and following her grandmother’s death, the 100 hours of recordings were transformed into La once, a 70-minute documentary. The film was seen by more than 25 thousand people in theaters, is currently on Netflix and in 2015 was nominated for the Goya Awards in the Best Ibero-American Film category, an award to which the director arrived with two of the three protagonists who are alive. “The other day I went to have tea with them and in two hours they must have asked for three selfies and two autographs,” she says.

Over time, the filmmaker realized that the film was more universal than she thought. “I noticed that people connected easily with the theme of old age, grandparents, parents, friendship. When we took it to Korea, the audience said ‘it looks like my grandmother,'” he says.

No country for old people

What came next had to do with the situation in which the protagonists of La once lived, which is very different from that of most of the elderly in Chile. “They have the freedom to have a good time, they can live alone or they can pay someone to accompany them, so they are not in an old people’s home,” she says. The other side is precisely the one that appeared in his next project Yo no soy de aquí, which was recently nominated for Best Short Film at the European Film Awards after premiering on the New York Times website in mid-September of this year: “Nobody goes to the cinema to see a short film, so we had to think of other distribution windows. The New York Times asked for it for a long time, we had doubts, but it was the best platform. It gives you a seal of quality,” he says.

Yo no soy de aquí emerged within the framework of the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival, which has a program that brings together two directors from different parts, almost on a blind date, to carry out a joint project. So it is a short film co-directed with Lithuanian Giedre Zickyte. The protagonist is Josebe, a woman who came from Rentería, a town in the Basque Country, in northern Spain, to Chile following her husband. It is a true story that shows her in her 90s as she introduces herself to the rest of the people in her nursing home and proudly recalls her origins. Although she has the memories of her youth and especially life in her hometown, she has forgotten her life afterwards and does not know how she came to the nursing home. “It used to be more normal for grandpa to be in the house, now there is an age when we assume that they have to live in nursing homes. Of course there are people who require special care, but I feel that we have begun to marginalize the elderly from family and social circles, where only one class has the right to access certain privileges or panoramas,” says Alberdi.

Why did you want to portray the elderly?

For several reasons. First, because I’m interested in representing the present. So I have to choose situations and spaces where things happen and where the characters have pressures and can reveal themselves to the camera. And the third age is clearly a stage where they are at a critical moment, memory is revealed, death appears.

What is the other reason?

Because they are characters who come back. So they say everything they think, they have no problems with the camera, you see their clear personalities. I spend much less time getting them used to it, they are totally open. Besides, it is a stage that can be graphed from many visions and positions, with questions and discussions that seem to be resolved but are not.

Even so, she clarifies that she does not feel “anchored to the third age”. The best example is her current work, Los niños, a documentary she is finishing, which follows a group of adults with Down syndrome who, in their fifties, yearn to be treated as adults. “My work has more to do with the deep observation of micro-spaces, of small societies that represent a part of our idiosyncrasy and goes beyond ages,” he says. Although it is ready, and will be released in theaters in the first half of 2017, its debut was this month at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, where it had a very good reception: after its premiere Alberdi won the EDA Award for Best Female-Directed Documentary (best female documentary direction) awarded by the IDFA Alliance of Women Film Journalists. “It is the most important documentary festival in the world, and few Latin American films have made it to the official competition. It is the place where I have premiered all my previous documentaries, a space that has supported my career and I am very grateful to them, but this is the first time I am in the official competition, which makes me very proud,” she says.

Variety magazine critic Guy Lodge, in his review of the documentary, noted the gentle, touching and empathetic side of the work, which doesn’t lose charisma in that act. “Although Alberdi’s brief, cozy film offers plenty of sweetness and light humor, the sad anger in its message never fails to burn,” the critic commented, pointing to how the director speaks of the problems the characters must face in a society that treats them as disabled.

What was it like working with people with Down syndrome?

I have an aunt who has Down syndrome, so I’ve been used to interacting with her all my life. Rather, the challenge as a director was the other way around, the complex thing was to try to put myself in the eyes of someone who does not have that kind of relationship and to show her the story and the characters.

She says, however, that the most difficult part was cutting and editing: “It was a very long shoot, many hours and a lot of material”.