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Author: Nicolás Jerez Lazo for Ya Magazine (El Mercurio)
Acclaimed by the public and with a prominent participation in the Oscar race, Maite Alberdi’s latest documentary emerged from the work of a team led by her and three other women. Here they talk about the film’s impact on their lives, the threat the pandemic posed to their plans, and the leap to competing in the big leagues of the audiovisual industry. “At one point, everyone told us we didn’t stand a chance,” they recall.
A year ago, when the health crisis reached Chile, filmmaker Maite Alberdi (37) was overcome with uncertainty.
She had the same daily concerns of the people around her, but she was overcome with an additional worry: her documentary “El agente topo”, premiered shortly before at the Sundance Film Festival, suddenly saw its distribution in local movie theaters threatened.
Shortly afterwards, Maite confirmed that its arrival in Chilean theaters, scheduled for June 11, would indeed be impossible. -We had a very difficult year in which we didn’t know how to work, despite what we had done with all the other films,” recalls the director today, amidst almost unanimous recognition of the film. The previous formulas no longer worked for us. Her use of the plural is not random.
When she uses it, she is referring to the circle of female iron that brought together the audiovisual company Micromundo around her most recent film project, made up of executive producer Marcela Santibáñez (36), editor Carolina Siraqyan (54) and general producer Daniela Sandoval (38). This core group was joined by the rest of the documentary team, which includes associate producers from Germany, Spain, the United States and the Netherlands.
Faithful to the plans they had originally drawn up for the film, Maite Alberdi and her colleagues released “El agente topo” nationally before the end of the winter and persisted in an intense promotional campaign, convinced of the potential of the proposal. Their persistence and quality paid off: the film was pre-selected in the categories of Best Documentary and Best Foreign Film at the next Oscars, and achieved an outstanding participation in the last Goya Awards. In between, it was included in the Netflix catalog. -Our objectives were always to conquer new territory. We wanted to go a step further.
Marcela Santibáñez, who met Maite while they were both studying Audiovisual Direction at the Catholic University, says that her “dress rehearsal” was the visibility campaign for “La once” (2014), another acclaimed documentary by the filmmaker. -It was fun, because at that time everyone told us that we didn’t stand a chance. And it happened a bit like now: we united, we fought against the giants, it worked out and we were nominated (for the Goya). That made us grow and realize that we could work well together. Now, looking back, I feel deeply proud. That pride, she adds, is a reflection of a certain group epic. -We’re competing in the big leagues, but this is the team. We are a group of girls giving our lives from home for a very big dream.
UNBELIEVABLY REAL
“The Mole Agent” tells the story of Sergio Chamy, an octogenarian widower who accepts an unusual assignment: to enter a nursing home as an undercover agent to investigate an allegation of abuse against one of the residents.
His three-month stay at the home was filmed, in turn, as a secret mission, since Maite Alberdi’s crew followed the protagonist’s footsteps without revealing the details of the situation to his entourage until the film’s editing. When it came to filming, the director made use of the aesthetics of detective films, a resource that aroused the fascination and at times the bewilderment of the critics.
She explains it this way: Historically, we have consumed gringo cinema, whose documentary tradition has been a very classic format, with archives, interviews and voice-over. Why can’t the documentary have a genre, if in the end the only thing different is the raw material with which it works? However, a key role in the construction of the story was played by Carolina Siragyan, an editor with experience in advertising and music videos for artists such as Gepe and Francisca Valenzuela.
Her path and that of the filmmaker crossed paths when, aware of her knowledge as an editor, Maite asked Carolina to make the trailer for “Los niños” (2016), a documentary about adults with Down syndrome. For the latter film, Carolina Siragyan spent two months cataloging the material spread over 60 days, Hundreds of hours of footage and thousands of scenes. Only after that task came the real editing work.
The collection and order of the shots revealed much more than the main plot: parallel to the story about espionage, the physical and mental deterioration, the difficulties in finding a job and, above all, the loneliness in which the elderly live, emerged as background themes. -Just as Sergio changed the perspective of his research, we also went through the same process,” says Carolina, “After five months of work we saw that even his research began to lose some of its importance. Once he entered the home, everything was reality itself. “Incredibly real,” the director of the documentary will summarize a few minutes later.
OLD AGE
Still surprised, Maite Alberdi says that a few days ago she learned of a trivial yet powerful event: a viewer sent a bouquet of flowers to Sergio Chamy’s former asylum mates. -Someone was so moved that they went out of their way to buy a gift for the characters. For me, that’s all there is to it. These are the political gestures we are waiting for with the film.
These social implications brought audiovisual communicator Daniela Sandoval closer to the filmography of Maite Alberdi, with whom she had already coincided in the production of “El salvavidas” (201), which tells the story of a beach watchman with an aversion to water.
Other projects in which Daniela participated, such as the documentary “74 square meters” and the TVN miniseries “Zamudio: lost in the night”, already had in common the fact of dealing with contingent problems. -El agente topo” has helped us to become aware that we are all going to be senior citizens and that we have to accompany them in this process. I heard from people who have relatives in homes and who, after watching the film, are doing their best to become more present in their lives. Carolina Siragyan adds: “The documentary came at a very appropriate moment, because people’s conscience is open to change. There are things that were not working. The social crisis and the pandemic made us realize what loneliness is. A lot of people, not necessarily old, were lonely and locked up, and opened up to be much more sensitive to this. Old age can be a super fucked-up topic, and it’s an inevitability that’s going to touch us all.
Despite the latter, all four agree that the film offers a joyful and even comical vision of old age. -The day-to-day life in that home is full of humor and light,” says Maite. That’s the fun, those are the complexities of life that I feel documentaries have to rescue. I can be grieving, but I can be laughing too. You wouldn’t have to pigeonhole it into drama or comedy. Why would you have to? We have the genres in our heads. Life has everything, sometimes in one day or in one story.
Incidentally, you think that a story of this type could help to communicate emotions more openly. -It’s funny to read on social networks that everyone cries when they see the documentary,” Marcela reflects. I don’t know if in another instance people would have dared to tell it, but I think that after a year like this, in which we have all dared to say that we are tired or sad, we are a little more willing to open up. That is already a step forward.
THE MICRO-WORLD
For the four leaders of the production company, the intensity of working life inexorably affects private space. In some cases, the health crisis has become an unexpected ally, even though everything depends on managing time well. -I am happy to have been included in one of the nominees and to have not stopped picking up my son from kindergarten for a single day,” Maite says. That’s success for me. We are always thinking that we want to travel and at the same time be at home. In a way, this context gave us another possibility, but we are only just getting to grips with it, given how complex it was, in the middle of the pandemic, to have our film in storage.
Added to this challenge are other difficulties they have had to overcome, such as the obstacles when it comes to getting paid for their own work (“From a gender perspective”, says Maite, there is “a fear of being left without work”) or the fact of being a small group that, to top it all, embarks on long term projects in which patience and optimization of resources are essential.
In that sense, they say, the key lies in mutual support. -I don’t know if it works because we are women, but of course it does, because we bond in a different way,” says Marcela Santibáñez Daniela Sandoval, who some years ago went into accounting and then returned to the audiovisual world, stresses the need for collaboration and solidarity in an industry that cannot or does not always want to afford them. -I feel that they are my chosen family. Since we are a small team, we manage to bond and know when the other one is stressed, so we can free her up and then get back to work. It’s hard to find that support elsewhere. Another important thing is to feel that there is no competition between us. Marcela confirms: “This adventure is not just a job. We have become friends. When we go to festivals to present the film, we have a good time, we put on face masks at night.
The limits start to blur a little and we have to be careful, but at the same time I think that, if it wasn’t because I love them so much, maybe I wouldn’t have given as much effort as I am giving. That happens to all of us.
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