aAt the beginning of the Chilean documentary The Eternal Memory, a woman asks her husband, who has Alzheimer’s disease, if he likes his life. He beams back at her. “I love life.” The couple will be immediately recognizable to audiences in Chile. He is Augusto Góngora, a journalist who was part of an underground television news service during the Pinochet dictatorship. On the streets he filmed the reality of life under military rule – at great personal risk. The group’s bulletins, recorded on VHS tapes, were passed from house to house across the country. When Chile returned to democracy, Góngora became an influential figure on public television. His partner of 25 years, Paulina Urrutia, is a famous stage and film actor. In 2014, at the age of 62, Góngora was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The Eternal Memory documents the couple’s final years together, as Urrutia becomes his full-time caregiver.
Surprisingly, it is a tender and ultimately joyful portrait of a couple still deeply in love. The film’s director, Maite Alberdi, nods with a smile. “Yes. It’s a story that is tragic on paper, but not in reality. In the years I photographed with them, I never left feeling sad.”
Alberdi is a documentary maker. She met the couple in 2018, while giving a lecture to film students at a university where Urrutia taught theater. A few months earlier, Góngora had made his Alzheimer’s diagnosis public in a magazine interview. “It was very courageous because he was director of the public (television) channel. He stopped and gave the interview and told the whole country.”
What struck Alberdi that day at university was that Urrutia had brought Góngora to work with her – he had become part of her routine, accepted and welcomed by her colleagues, who contributed to his care. “He was happy, and she was happy. They were a couple, very normal.” There is a scene in the film that shows this: Urrutia is rehearsing a play with Góngora by her side on stage, happy and smiling. The other actors are relaxed about the setup: someone stops to give Góngora a goodbye kiss on the cheek as he leaves; another squats down for a chat.
In her previous documentaries, Alberdi looked at the lives of people who were excluded by society. Her Oscar-nominated film The Mole Agent showed the elderly alone in a care home in their final years. Did seeing Góngora and Urrutia together feel like the opposite of that? “Yes. Completely. I’ve shot people with dementia before. I always saw them isolated from society. This was the first example of someone trying to be part of society. It was incredible and very special. I thought: I have to make this love story.”
Góngora immediately agreed to be filmed. He was not ashamed of his illness. He also felt he owed it to people to share his experiences. “He said to Urrutia: ‘I have filmed so many people in my life. During the dictatorship, people opened their doors to show me their vulnerability and pain. So why don’t I open my doors and show my vulnerability?’” In old clips of his news broadcasts, his compassion and humor as a journalist practically glows on the screen.
Urrutia, however, was less enthusiastic about the idea of a film. “And I completely agreed with her,” says Alberdi. As a prominent woman in Chile, Urrutia felt vulnerable to criticism. In 2006, she was plucked from non-political life to become the country’s first Minister of Culture. It took its toll. ‘When she was a minister, you saw the interviews on television. It was like, why don’t you have kids? Why are you prioritizing that?” Alberdi pauses indignantly. “Do you really ask that question to a minister? How dare you!”
Together, the couple made the decision to appear in the film. Alberdi’s plan was to show how they lived – “their social life, going to parties” – and not hide Góngora’s disease. Alberdi has a young son and says she learned from Urrutia how to be more honest about her caregiving responsibilities. “As a mother, before I met her, I always hid my domestic problems. ‘I can do it!’” Now she’s taking a leaf out of Urrutia’s book: “I say, ‘I’m with my son, but it’s OK. I’ll bring him. ”
Then, two years into filming, Covid struck. Due to Santiago’s strict lockdowns, Góngora had no visitors for a year and a half: “It was too risky.” During that time, Urrutia took over camera duties, giving the film some of its most tender and disturbing moments: Late at night, Góngora wandered around in the dark, brooding, asking about his adult children (from a previous relationship). “It was a film lesson,” Alberdi admits. “My whole career I was so concerned about the perfect photo, the perfect image. This is not That, but it’s so deep and intimate. I will never have that intimacy at two in the morning, with people alone in the middle of the night.”
The lockdown was tough for the couple: Urrutia took care of her husband alone and Góngora had no company. “You see it in the movie. He used to cycle and then he can hardly walk anymore,” says Alberdi. “He lost his language after the pandemic.” His doctor told the family that during the pandemic he deteriorated as much in one month as he had previously done in a year – “because he wasn’t seeing people.”
Alberdi planned to film Góngora until his death. Instead, there was a moment – it’s in the film, after the lockdown – when she decided to turn off the camera. Góngora turns to his wife and says, “I am not myself anymore.” Behind the camera it was the first time Alberdi felt uncomfortable. “The day before he said, ‘I don’t want to live anymore.’”
She pauses. “It was very clear to me that if he doesn’t want to live, of course he doesn’t want to shoot. So that was my last day.” Góngora died at home in May at the age of 71, cared for until the end by Urrutia. A few months earlier, The Eternal Memory premiered at Sundance and won the Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary.
I ask Alberdi what Urrutia thinks of the film, after her initial hesitation? “She is very grateful now. She said the movie is a gift to her.” How? “She never believed it would be like this, so… Augusto. She thought it would be more like Alzheimer’s. But she thinks it is the film Augusto would have made of himself. She feels he is alive.”
After caring for her husband full-time in the later stages of his illness, Urrutia travels the world to film festivals. “She said, ‘I came back into society with him taking my hand with the movie.’ That’s how she wants to remember him.”
“She also said that it is nice to share the grief. That when someone you love dies, no one wants to talk to you about it. But she wanted to speak and the film is the best excuse to speak.”