The Eternal Memory captures essence of journalist’s identity, love story

Open this photo in gallery:

The gray-haired man in his pyjamas doesn’t know who he is or who the woman sitting on the edge of his bed is. But as she gently yet vivaciously tells him about himself – “You’re a journalist! You have three children!” – he doesn’t seem upset. Instead, he’s fascinated by her. He even flirts a bit: “Oh, you’re an actress?” It feels like we’re witnessing his first sparks of attraction to her. Like we’re watching him fall in love.

In fact, they’ve been married for 25 years, and he’s had Alzheimer’s disease for the last eight. He is Augusto Góngora, a force in Chilean journalism. She is Paulina Urrutia, an actress, academic and Chile’s first Minister of Culture, Arts and Heritage. And this opening scene to a remarkable documentary about them, The Eternal Memory, captures everything its director, Maite Alberdi, hopes to say about how love and the essence of a person can survive, even when much is lost.

By the time Alberdi – the first Chilean woman to be nominated for an Oscar, for her 2020 documentary The Mole Agent – met Augusto and Pauli, as they call each other in the film, Augusto’s memory was already failing.

“Yet I completely understood his loves, his obsessions, his pains, because they continued,” Alberdi told me in a video interview. “He doesn’t know how many years they’ve been together, but when Pauli asks, ‘Do we have kids together?’ he knows to answer, ‘No. Because you didn’t want that.’ That was painful for him, so that memory is in his body.”

“Even if you lose memory, there’s an identity your body maintains.”

Augusto is an especially poignant subject for a film about memory, because maintaining Chile’s collective cultural and political record was his life’s work. During the military dictatorship from 1973 to 1981, General Augusto Pinochet shut down the mainstream media. Augusto became part of Teleanálisis, a clandestine news organization that conducted street-level interviews and distributed the tapes nationwide.

Those images are now Chile’s primary archive of the dictatorship – the visual memory of the country. Later, when democracy was restored, Augusto was in charge of cultural programming on Televisión Nacional de Chile, the main public broadcaster.

In one scene, Pauli shows Augusto a book he wrote, Chile: The Forbidden Memory. “It is very important to reconstitute memory,” he reads aloud from the introduction, as if hearing the words for the first time. “Not to remain anchored in the past, but because reconstituting memory is an act with a sense of the future. It is an attempt to see oneself, to know the problems and weaknesses in order to overcome them.”

Chileans need to reconstitute their emotional memory, he continues, “precisely because these years have been so hard, so traumatic, so full of pain. Memory is courage.” He looks up from the book and smiles. “It’s nice to remember what one has done.”

Hearing his words today, on the 50th anniversary of Chile’s coup, you might shiver: Journalists and journalism are still under threat around the world – even in North America. So is democracy. Here in Canada, the struggle for truth and reconciliation continues.

At its core, however, Alberdi’s film is about love. She knew of Augusto and Pauli as public figures, but she first met them at a lecture Pauli was giving, well after Augusto had disclosed his illness. He was in the audience, and Alberdi was struck by how Pauli remained lighthearted and unembarrassed, even when some of his behaviour could be considered inappropriate. “So many people with dementia or illness are isolated from society,” Alberdi says. “In this case I saw the complete opposite.”

When Alberdi contacted the couple afterward, Augusto immediately agreed to be filmed. “He said, ‘I recorded so much fragility, why would I not record my own?’” Alberdi recalls. “And Pauli called the film his most consequential act. Fragility is a part of everyone’s life, though few want to admit it. We have to see it, discuss it, to learn the best way to live with it.”

Alberdi and a crew of two (camera and sound) filmed the couple about once a week for four years. When COVID-19 restricted them, Pauli shot scenes herself. “The camera was a kind of company for her,” Alberdi says.

Opinion: Justice for Pablo Neruda is justice for Chile

The resulting film is startlingly intimate (Pauli shaving Augusto’s face), heartbreaking (Pauli in their kitchen at 3 p.m., crying with frustration because Augusto’s been agitated since 6 a.m.), anguished (Augusto, awake in the night, unable to recognize his own reflection) and achingly tender (Augusto, able to recall the party where they met: “We started talking, and it began”).

When she initiated this project, Alberdi thought she might continue filming until Augusto’s last day. “Ten, 15 years, I didn’t have a deadline,” she says. “Then came the day he said, ‘I’m not myself any more.’ He was conscious he was not the person he wanted to be. It was the first time I felt uncomfortable shooting him. So it was clear to me that was my last day.”

He died in May, long after the film was completed. By the end he could no longer move or speak.

As the film travels the festival circuits – it won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival – Pauli is participating in its promotion. “She says, ‘It’s so Augusto, he would be so proud of it,’” Alberdi says.

“For her, it’s a way to be with him. When someone is in mourning, people avoid speaking of the dead. But that’s when you need to speak about them! Of course, it’s difficult. She spent 10 years completely taking care of him. When we travelled to the Berlin Film Festival in February, it was the first time in 10 years that she slept in a bed other than theirs.”

Alberdi’s film ends with an image of Pauli and Augusto before he was ill, “as a way to maintain them in love forever,” she says. But she was surprised to learn the moment Pauli would turn back the clock to: “Two years ago Pauli told me, ‘I miss the Augusto of six months ago.’” Not 10 years ago, or 20. Just six months, when he was well enough that she could take an afternoon walk alone around her neighbourhood.

“She’s not dreaming of his company when they were young,” Alberdi says. “She misses the present-day Augusto, when things were okay enough.”

Sign up for The Globe’s arts and lifestyle newsletters for more news, columns and advice in your inbox.

Conervatives prevail in key vote for new Chile constitution