Maite Alberdi made history when she became the first Chilean woman to be nominated for an Oscar thanks to her 2021 documentary The Mole Agent. She repeated the distinction earlier this year when her latest doc, The Eternal Memory, competed for an Academy Award in a stacked category that ultimately went to 20 Days in Mariupol.
It was the latest distinction in a long list for Alberdi, who previously directed critically acclaimed feature docs like 2014’s La Once and 2016’s The Grown-Ups. But even with all of that success, Alberdi says people still ask her shocking questions about her résumé. “I just received a question, ‘When are you going to make a film?’ And it’s like, I make films,” Alberdi told The Hollywood Reporter recently during a sit-down interview at Xcaret in Riviera Maya, Mexico, ahead of the Platino Awards. The assumption is that documentaries are not “real films,” according to these ill-informed commenters. “I’ve already made five films, and I will continue making films.”
Alberdi has long been inspired by real life because it provides a wealth of material. “Reality is so powerful, and it’s so full of stories and experiences that I really don’t need to write something because everything is already written,” continued Alberdi ahead of the Platino Awards ceremony at which The Eternal Memory won a best documentary trophy.
That said, she is moving into uncharted territory with her next project by prepping her narrative feature debut — an adaptation of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s book Las Homicidas. The 2019 tome dissects the murders committed by four Chilean women and how society responded to the crimes and their perpetrators. As for her approach to this new terrain, Alberdi seemed stoked by the chance to steer the production in a way that she’s not done in her previous documentaries.
“You control everything. You write the script, the actors do what you ask them to do and the problems can be resolved by money,” she explained. “Everything is so controlled.”