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Chile / USA / Germany / Netherlands / Spain

Maite Alberdi • Director of The Mole Agent

“Old people dare to say what they think”

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- Between its enthusiastic reception at Sundance and San Sebastián and an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary, the Chilean filmmaker’s latest offering has met with spectacular success

Maite Alberdi  • Director of The Mole Agent

After an exuberant response in Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Competition and at Karlovy Vary, The Mole Agent [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Maite Alberdi
film profile
]
scooped the Audience Award for Best European Film at last year’s San Sebastián International Film Festival. Now, it’s bound for the Oscars with a nomination for Best Documentary Feature and poised to make landfall in cinemas across Spain. We reached out to the film’s director, Maite Alberdi, to find out more.

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Cineuropa: Technology plays an important narrative role in your latest film: do you think that older people are completely mystified by it, or are they adapting at their own pace?
Maite Alberdi:
Certainly, it always raises a good chuckle whenever the main character is trying to get to grips with technology — it happens every time. It has been a useful device to evoke empathy and compassion for older people, since viewers relate these situations to their parents’ and grandparents’ experience. All of us are trying to adapt at bewildering speed; our mole agent deserves a lot of credit for the way he has risen to the challenge and tackled this learning process. 

Your previous film, La Once, also explored old age, something that’s quite rare in cinema. Where did this interest come from?
I’m interested in that world because it offers so many possible themes. There are no universal truths when it comes to old age. I don’t believe in labels; I felt the same way about the people with Down’s syndrome who appeared in my film The Grown-ups [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, which showed just how diverse they are. Older people are at a stage in life when there is a lot going on. They dare to say what they think, they are saying goodbye to friends and they are undergoing a lot of changes. Someone involved in La Once told me that there’s a world of difference between a one-year-old child and a two-year-old; the same thing happens to a woman between the ages of 81 and 82. For me, as someone who devotes her time to capturing this reality and looking for concrete actions, old age is a whole landscape of prominent changes that I have the privilege of narrating to an audience. There is enormous diversity in people’s stories and characters, and the material never runs out. I feel like I could make ten more films about the same demographic, because old age isn’t a theme — it’s a context. 

Right now, care homes are particularly vulnerable due to the pandemic. Having filmed inside one of these facilities, did it ever occur to you that something like this could happen?
There have been many losses due to COVID; older people have been the worst-affected group. But what really strikes me is that, in this particular place, it was preceded by another pandemic: of loneliness. The residents were already socially isolated; their front doors were closed, metaphorically speaking, before lockdown came along. Many of them received no visitors and had no family to attend their funerals. Of course, the pandemic has forced them to seal themselves off more officially, but the symbolic lockdown began long before: nobody was coming in, and they were in their own little bubble of isolation.

The film was selected for festivals including Sundance, San Sebastián and Karlovy Vary. Were audience reactions different in each case, or have you noticed a common thread?
The documentary was made before the onset of the pandemic, and that’s how it was viewed at Sundance. More recently, it has been fascinating to see how Spanish audiences (at the San Sebastián International Film Festival and Abycine) interpret it from a new perspective. The film has become very painful to watch, because it sheds light on a reality that nobody really saw before COVID-19. I originally hoped that, after seeing the film, children and grandchildren would call their older relatives to check in, and I still do, because as far as I can see nothing has changed for those in care homes. Before the pandemic, I found myself filming a lot of funerals where the only mourners were other residents and staff — not a single relative. For whom does this pandemic of abandonment among older adults come as a shock? For those who are on the outside. Because people in care homes were already alone, isolated, dying with nobody by their side, both in Spain and elsewhere, just like those in their own homes. I’m not a political theorist. I film people’s experience, and then use that to draw attention to the crisis in today’s society. It really hit me, seeing how moved the audience was at San Sebastián, and it made me realise how apt it is that The Mole Agent is being released this year, in light of the pandemic.

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(Translated from Spanish)

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