THE ETERNAL MEMORY
A film by Maite Alberdi
2023, 85 minutes
2023, 85 minutes
No. 427
Documentary
Documentary
2024 Academy Award Nominee | Best Documentary Feature Film
Description
Winner of the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema – Documentary in 2023, The Eternal Memory is directed by the first Chilean woman to be nominated for an Academy Award, Maite Alberdi (The Mole Agent). It tells a profound and moving love story that balances vibrant individual and collective remembrance with the longevity of an unbreakable human bond.
Augusto and Paulina have been together and in love for 25 years. Eight years ago, their lives were forever changed by Augusto’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. As one of Chile’s most prominent cultural commentators and television presenters, Augusto is no stranger to building an archive of memory. Now he turns that work to his own life, trying to hold on to his identity with the help of his beloved Paulina, whose own pre-eminence as a famous actress and Chilean Minister of Culture predates her ceaselessly inventive manner of engaging with her husband.
Day by day, the couple faces this challenge head-on, relying on the tender affection and sense of humor shared between them that remains, remarkably, fully intact.
Festivals
Winner, Grand Jury World Documentary Prize, Sundance Film Festival
Official Selection, Berlinale Film Festival
Reviews
"A heart-piercing and unforgettable documentary. As exquisitely humane a film as you’re likely to see all year. Equally miraculous is a nonfiction movie forged in the direst of challenges that never comes across like an issue-driven medical narrative. Alberdi’s beautiful meditation has the viewer’s anatomy in its sights: touching the heart, activating the mind, working its way into our bones." - Los Angeles Times
"Three and a half stars (our of four)" - Washington Post
"A testament to the vitality and fragility of memory that itself serves as an act of preservation—of a prized past, a fraught present and an everlasting devotion." - The Daily Beast
"Grade: A. It's a striking and intimate piece of cinema, a heartrending tale of living with and battling neurological disorders, the love necessary to endure it, and the anguished dolor of remembrance." - The Playlist
