Reseñas de la crítica

Alberdi’s film slowly reveals the personal loss of the ability to remember as inextricably linked to the loss of national memory. Through the figure of a journalist whose work centered around the quest to recognize the disavowed atrocities of Chile’s dictatorship, the director offers us a sort of thesis incarnate.

This insistent parallel between individual and national consciousness never culminates in quite the rhetorical kicker Alberdi seems to be seeking, but there’s power in it just the same: a reminder of how our best efforts to keep and curate memories — for ourselves and others — can be thwarted by time.

We’re all familiar with the devastation that Alzheimer’s can cause but Alberdi’s achievement is to put us in touch with the deep love and care that often endures between family members despite all its challenges.

[T]he powerful The Eternal Memory chronicles the lives of Augusto and Paulina, a prominent Chilean couple who navigate the challenges of Alzheimer’s disease in unbreakable unison... their dignified love, shared and magnified through pockets of joy that Alberdi’s camera witnesses and celebrates with a generous side of empathy and sense of humor.

Alberdi is too bright and generous a filmmaker to rely merely on juxtaposition as means of eliciting an emotional response. She constantly reminds us that, despite Góngora’s illness, her film is about celebrating life through the lives of her subjects.

Heartbreak, hope and history play off each other to compelling effect in Chilean director Maite Alberdi’s The Eternal Memory, an intimate, understated and often wrenching portrayal of a couple under pressure from Alzheimer’s disease...

As past and present intermingle, crossfade, and coexist, Alberdi’s poignant doc blossoms into something profoundly moving, melancholy, generous, and empathetic in its own right. And the way the past and present synchronize... will cleave your heart in two.

Like Alberti’s previous film “The Mole Agent,” which saw a perfectly fit senior citizen infiltrate an old folks’ home as if he were a spy, the director sees something different in aging and the peril it brings than most, having the love story between Paulina and Augusto rise to the surface rather than his deteriorating mental state.

It’s not an easy watch. Similar to other Alzheimer's documentaries like “Dick Johnson is Dead” and “Our Time Machine,” in our small yet inescapable way, we feel the mourning their able-bodied loved one is experiencing.

By offering such a frank and intimate window into Paulina and Augusto’s lives, Alberdi finds a heartbreaking story. However, the film harnesses the positive spirit that Paulina resolves to uphold while caring for her husband, thus offering welcome moments of levity and grace. While it’s a sad story, The Eternal Memory defines their tale not by tragedy, but by love.

Alberdi makes her directorial hand virtually invisible, observing her subjects from a discreet distance that allows them to be narrators of their own story while never speaking directly to the camera.

The result is one of the most personal depictions of Alzheimer’s ever captured on camera, a poignant marriage story, and a national metaphor.