After making his first full-length novel, In Her Place, acclaimed Chilean documentarian Maite Alberdi has returned to his roots with his latest film, A Child of My Own (Un hijo propio).
As with his Oscar-nominated film Agent Moll, Alberdi uses a hybrid documentary/fiction format, but in The Child he also breaks the fourth wall at key moments.
A Child of My Own, which will have its world premiere at a special presentation at the Berlin International Film Festival, is about Alejandra, who, under pressure from her new husband and his family, decides to fake her pregnancy to please them. What starts as a simple lie grows into a complex display that she must carry out for months in front of her spouse and their extended family. The deception eats away at her, and Alejandra crosses a line of no return.
Alberdi recalls meeting Alejandra while they were working on another project in Mexico. “When I heard her story, I was very impressed that a woman had been pretending to be pregnant for such a long time and had a simulated experience. It’s truly an amazing story that I can’t believe it’s fiction.”
“It makes you think about what leads a woman to falsely become pregnant, what that choice did to her, and how she was living in a xenophobic environment at the time.”
Regarding how they arrived at the documentary format, Alberdi says, “When we first heard her story, we felt that the best way to reflect on that past was through staged scenes with actors, built on her testimony and perspective. This allowed us to enter a more traditional documentary space, including interviews, observations, and archival material. These two approaches intersect to accompany her over time and trace the process of her life over some 16 years.”
“I think what this film ultimately provides is a perspective, a distance in time. Over the years, she was able to realize her mistakes and understand them in a different way, and she was able to see more clearly where she is now.”
Produced by Netflix’s Gato Grande, Child was filmed in Mexico with a professional cast including Ana Celeste Montalbo Peña, Luisa Guzman, Armando Espitia, Mayra Serbro, Casio Figueroa, Alejandro Porter, Mayra Batala and Ángeles Cruz.
“We were lucky to work with some great Mexican actors, and for them it was a real challenge because they weren’t creating the characters from scratch. Halfway through the film, we switch to the real protagonists, so they had to spend a lot of time talking to real people and building from there. It became a beautiful exercise in observation and interpretation,” she recalls.
“At first we wanted non-professional actors, but we realized what we needed was more complex. They had to embody real people, and for that we needed really great actors.”
Commenting on the honor of having its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, director Alberdi said: “Berlin is a great festival of dialogue. The interaction with the audience is always very rich. This is a film that sparks intense debate and meaningful conversations, and I really want to have these discussions with both the audience and the press. Berlin is the perfect place for that.”
The screenplay was written by Julián Loyola and Esteban Student, co-writers of Pablo Trapero’s The Clan, and produced by Sandra Godinez (Roma), Carla González Vargas (Gato Grande CEO), and Maximiliano Sanguin (The Statue of Liberty).
“This is a very multicultural team, with an Argentine screenwriter, an Argentine producer, a Chilean production designer, a Chilean cinematographer, and the rest of the crew is Mexican.”
When asked if she leans towards the documentary format, she says: “In the end, I prefer to work with reality. That’s where my story begins. The format, fiction or documentary, doesn’t really matter to me. What I care most about is working with reality as a starting point.”
