Winner! Sundance Grand Jury Prize

Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi follows up the Oscar-nominated The Mole Agent with this affecting study of political journalist Augusto Góngora’s struggle with neurodegenerative disease. The Eternal Memory treats inexorably sad material with a lighter, more lyrical approach than most — focusing less on the ravages of living with Alzheimer’s than on the slippery, transient concept of memory itself. Key to the film’s thesis is that its subject labored to bring the iniquities of the Pinochet regime to public attention — and later dedicated himself to conserving that national memory for future generations. Yet even as the film grapples with Chilean history through the prism of one man’s faltering recall, this is not as densely a conceptual or intellectual a work. Instead, it’s the simple love story between Góngora and his devoted wife and carer, former Chilean culture minister Paulina Urrutia, that gives Alberdi’s film its spine and its heart. —Variety

“It is much more than a love story; it’s a marvel of all that memory can store.” —Exclaim!