It’s an emotional love story in the context of illness as Paulina takes care of Augusto as his Alzheimer’s disease symptoms worsen throughout the pandemic. We watch Augusto get to rediscover his love as well his work in preserving in the cultural memory of Chile throughout the Pinochet dictatorship. We break down THE ETERNAL MEMORY by Maite Alberdi, which took home the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary category of Sundance 2023.
Sundance 2023 Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
Distribution: MTV Documentary Films, Theatrical release on August 11, 2023, Premium Video on Demand on November 7, 2023, Streaming on Paramount+ on November 7, 2023
From the Sundance website: Augusto and Paulina have been together and in love for 25 years. Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and his wife has since become his caretaker. As one of Chile’s most prominent cultural commentators and television presenters, Augusto is no stranger to building an archive of memory, having been responsible for that herculean task following the Pinochet dictatorship and its systematic erasure of collective consciousness. Now he turns that work to his own life, trying to hold on to his identity with the help of his beloved. Day by day, the couple face this challenge head-on, adapting to the disruptions brought on by the taxing disease while relying on the tender affection and sense of humor shared between them that remains intact.
Oscar-nominated director and Sundance alum Maite Alberdi (The Mole Agent, 2020) returns to the festival with a film that gracefully delves into the melancholy of remembrance met with resistance, uplifted by the beautiful partnership at its core. Traversing decades of intimacy, The Eternal Memory elegantly cements Alberdi’s place as one of today’s most thoughtful documentarians.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.501] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All the Way Down, where we're continuing our series of looking at the documentaries from Sundance 2023. And today we're actually taking a look at the World Documentary Competition. It's the Grand Jury Prize winner of The Eternal Memory by Matt Alberti. It's actually also picked up by MTV Films, so it should be available for distribution at some point. So this is a film between a couple, Augusto, he's a journalist in Chile, and Paulina, she's an actress in Chile. I'm just going to read some of the synopsis here to give a bit of a sense of what the arc of the story is. So eight years ago, Augusto was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and his wife has since become his caretaker. As one of Chile's most prominent cultural commentators and television presenters, Augusto is no stranger to building an archive of memory, having been responsible for that Herculean task following the Pinochet dictatorship and its systematic erasure of collective consciousness. Now he turns that work to his own life, trying to hold on to his identity with the help of his beloved. So this is both a love story between the two of them, but also this story of illness and part of that illness being the erasure, the erasure of memory and identity over time. And we kind of track them over the course of the onset of the pandemic. And yeah, I'd love to just get some of your initial thoughts of this piece of the eternal memory.
[00:01:38.200] Wonder Bright: I mean, the first thing that I want to say about it is that for a film that is so heartbreaking, it is remarkably easy to watch. And the reason it's so easy to watch is because the love between these two is the kind of love that we write stories and make films about. And it's unavoidable. It's inescapable. Their capacity for seeing one another, and their generosity in allowing Alberti in to film them and see them seeing each other and thereby share their experience with us. It would be easy to say that this is a film about Alzheimer's and loss and memory and how much of our memory shapes our identity. And then at the heart of it, it's really about love and about how love shapes our identity. It's as much about how love shapes our identity as it is about how memory shapes our identity for me.
[00:02:49.365] Kent Bye: Yeah. And we follow this couple throughout, I don't know how many years it ends up being shot, but I read an interview on IndieWire saying that the filmmaker was prepared to shoot it for 25 or 30 years. But with the onset of the pandemic and all the different social isolation, it really accelerated the symptoms that Augusto was exhibiting. And so, you kind of have this journey that you're taking on of progression of the Alzheimer's onset throughout this piece that is really quite tragic to watch. But there's this interesting interplay between what is remembered and what isn't remembered, and at what point can you start to catalyze enough of a memory recollection. And so, just the way this film starts with... Paulina introducing herself to Augusto for what must have been like the hundredth or thousandth time, it's hard to know, but he's got this opportunity to discover that this beautiful woman is actually his wife and they didn't have any kids, but he had some kids from a prior relationship that he seems to recall with more memory than even this relationship with Paulina. I think all of that is to say that the film is exploring these mundane things are doing together and just going on walks and being together. And there's a bit of a, like a Nietzschean eternal recurrence where there's like these repetitions that are happening.
[00:04:15.155] Wonder Bright: I'm not familiar with that. What does that mean?
[00:04:17.236] Kent Bye: Okay. Here, let me, let me look it up real quick. I'm going to pull up the standard encyclopedia of philosophy. So the eternal recurrence of the same that Nietzsche himself suggests that the eternal recurrence was his most important thought. Some of what his doctrine is hypothesizing is that there's events in the world that repeat themselves in the same sequence through an eternal series of cycles. So it's essentially like these cycles of repeating. It's got an astrological tinge to it, but in this case, it's... I'm sure he didn't
[00:04:50.643] Wonder Bright: He may not have meant that, but obviously I'm taking it up.
[00:04:54.106] Kent Bye: Right. But even in the course of this film, there's these recurring cycles of reintroduction and there's a repeating that happens throughout this film that you get these recurrences. And to what degree does Paulina have that patience to those recurrences over time as those onset of Alzheimer's progressively gets worse. So yeah, that was kind of like a theme of this recurrence that it's called the eternal memory, but it reminds me of this Nietzschean thought of eternal recurrence that was kind of a structure that happens throughout the course of this film.
[00:05:27.730] Wonder Bright: So like a goldfish circling the bowl and it's seeing the hassle anew each time.
[00:05:36.508] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there's a bit of like a discovery where he gets to rediscover his love for Paulina all throughout the film, and... Because she creates the world like that.
[00:05:47.874] Wonder Bright: Yeah. The way she is with him, it reminds me a bit of the main character in that film that won the Oscar with that wonderful Italian actor. What's that called? A beautiful... Life. Beautiful life. because she's in charge of orchestrating their world. And they're very fortunate. They live a very privileged life. They can clearly afford for her to not be working as much. Maybe they have help. We don't know. We only ever see the two of them. But I'm not saying those things to diminish what she's doing or how it's occurring. It's more that She's able to create this world with him. And it's a gift. It was a gift for me. I think it's a gift for anybody to be able to follow her into that world that she creates. And it is so beautiful how she creates the opportunity for it to be an experience of discovery and reconnection rather than what I think most of us think of when we think of the loss of memory, where we focus on the loss of it. And she somehow just reinterpreted that with a sort of intentional magical thinking, and then take an action into it in a way that is so illuminating. And I found it really helpful, actually, you know, Thank heavens for Optimus, that's all I can say. It's really wonderful to watch.
[00:07:30.452] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's a really beautiful film, heartbreaking, but also at the same time, just the love transcends, and it's like this love story that you get to watch. But I think the other thing that's interesting about this film is that it starts to weave in this archival footage of Augusto's work as he's a journalist covering all of what's happening with the Pinochet dictatorship. And He's written a number of different books and so he's referring to his books throughout the movie as his friends because he gets to check in with them and see what they're thinking. But of course his actual connection to people in the outside world is hindered by COVID and the lockdown and you can only Imagine the increased amount of disorientation and confusion that he's facing there. But, you know, there's this culmination in some way of digging into the heart of some of this work that is focusing on memory. Someone who made his whole professional, you know, some of his biggest work to try to preserve the memories that were deliberately trying to be erased by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. And his work is explicitly calling out the importance of memory and that collective memory. And yet the irony is Yuri is, as an individual, losing that memory. And what's that do to one's identity? What's it do to one's connection to the outside world or to one's partner? And I think this film does an amazing job of capturing all of those different dimensions
[00:09:02.488] Wonder Bright: Well, and there's also a way in which through Paulina, his memory is restored. Every time he loses it, she brings him back. But she is sort of proving his initial point that the collective memory is stronger and more important than the individual memory. And that it isn't just on the individual to remember and carry through what was learned and what was understood. It's actually about how our witness is reflected in others and then reflected back to ourself and so on and so on. And it will carry forward as long as it needs to.
[00:09:49.414] Kent Bye: Yeah, there is something about that deeper cultural context that does trigger memories of people who have Alzheimer's. I know I've done interviews with people within the virtual reality industry that have recreated different scenes from different moments in time with different musical cues. And as people who are suffering from Alzheimer's go into some of these experiences, they see these cultural references that spark all these other memories. And you can see that within this film as well as Augusto and Paulina are watching some of the archival footage of coverage that he's doing. And in some ways, he's seeing it for the first time, but also she's asking him different questions. And more often than not, he's able to answer it based upon the memories that are coming back from almost kind of like deep into his cultural memory tissues. He's able to still articulate different aspects of this deeper cultural context that he's a part of. But I think that's some of the interesting ways of looking at Alzheimer's as a disease is to what degree are things cut off from your memory and what is still being preserved. And so, there's still the sense of his core identity of Augusto and his name and who he is, but does he remember his house? Does he remember his partner? Does he remember his family? Does he remember his job, his career, his friends? There's all these other dimensions that start to slowly fade away over time. So, Yeah, I feel like this film has a poetic quality and also just a very moving and I can see why the jurors gave it the nod for the Grangery Prize for World Documentary and for it to be picked up by MTV Documentary Films because it's just one of those stories that is working on many different levels. So yeah, what are you bearing witness to in this film?
[00:11:35.192] Wonder Bright: I would like to take away with me that feeling of hope that I mentioned earlier and Paulina's invention in the face of such tragedy and her willingness to stay with it and stay in love and love him as he was and as he deteriorated to continue to see him. Even as her definition of what that might be sort of shift or morphed from one moment to the next, she was always able to find her way back to that source. And as she found it, you would watch him find it as well. And we've been using what do you want to bear witness to as our final question for all of our coverage. And I feel like Paulina is a real, a real inspiration in terms of what that can look like.
[00:12:33.780] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd also like to bear witness to the amount of love and patience that Paulina is exhibiting throughout the course of this film. But also the deeper theme of memory is something that a section in the film where you start to really understand the degree to which Augusto is in his professional work talking about this time period from June of 1973 to May of 1983. and the importance of reconstructing those memories in a way that gives us a sense of the past and the future and just the poetic way in which that he's speaking about this in his professional career and juxtaposed against his own experience with memory. I just found it really moving to make those deeper connections around the importance of bearing witness. As a journalist, he was bearing witness to the things that were being erased in his culture. And he was trying to articulate the importance of bearing witness and to maintain a sense of some of these stories and memories. And that was a big part of his life. And yeah, I was just really moved by his work in the wide world and how that's connected to his own personal journey. So, yeah. So yeah, that was the Eternal Memory by Maitre Albert and it was part of the World Documentary Competition, took home the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize and is being distributed by MTV Films. So keep an eye out for it. So thanks again for joining us on Story All the Way Down. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can go to storyallthewaydown.com and you'll have more information about this podcast, other episodes and other ways that you can support the podcast. So thanks again for joining us.
