Spotlighting Maite Alberdi Cinema Mentiré partners with The Lexi Cinema to bring a partial retrospective of Chilean director Maite Alberdi to London. From lifelong friendships to unlikely spies and enduring love, discover three unforgettable documentaries by one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today.
July to September - THE LEXI CINEMA
Twice Oscar-nominated filmmaker Maite Alberdi has carved out a distinctive place within contemporary Chilean cinema. Alongside the release of her sixth feature documentary A Child of My Own this summer, The Lexi Cinema, in partnership with Cinema Mentiré, looks back at a selection of Alberdi’s previous work in its latest Spotlight season, celebrating international women filmmakers through dedicated programmes.
All Sunday screenings will include a special guest introduction, with tickets priced at £10.
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The season opens in July with Tea Time (2014), a tender and witty portrait of five women whose sixty-year friendship unfolds through monthly afternoons of tea and conversation. August brings the crowdpleaser The Mole Agent(2020), a quirky blend of spy flick and observational documentary in a charming meditation on loneliness and companionship. Rounding off the programme in September is The Eternal Memory (2023), the most-watched documentary in Chilean cinema history, following a journalist and his wife as they navigate life after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
Together, these films offer a compelling entry point into Alberdi’s precise eye for detail and character-driven storytelling. Connected by themes of ageing, identity, memory, and care, they foreground experiences often overlooked in mainstream cinema. Moving fluidly between intimacy and politics, private life and collective history, Alberdi crafts nuanced and compassionate portraits that reveal broader social realities. Her films embrace the porous boundary between fiction and reality, always allowing her subjects to remain active participants in shaping their own stories.
TEA TIME
LA ONCE. 2014, Chile, 70min.
Sunday, 26 July, 5.00pm. Intro by Cinema Mentiré
Wednesday, 29 July, 6.30pm
Five elderly women consistently gather for tea time once a month, since they left school sixty years ago. In these meetings, they argue, reminisce about their shared past, and try hard to convey that they are still standing, forgetting for a moment the ailments they suffer. Afternoons go by, and it seems that nothing in their lives will change, until the absence of one of them makes them face a period of evident transformations.
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THE MOLE AGENT
EL AGENTE TOPO. 2020, Chile / USA / Germany / Netherlands / Spain, 82min.
Sunday, 30 August, 5.30pm. Guest intro to be announced soon!
Wednesday, 2 September, 6.30pm
When a family becomes concerned about their mother’s well-being in a retirement home, private investigator Romulo hires Sergio, an 83 year-old man who becomes a new resident – and a mole inside the home, who struggles to balance his assignment with becoming increasingly involved in the lives of several residents.
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THE ETERNAL MEMORY
LA MEMORIA INFINITA. 2023, Chile / USA, 85min.
Sunday, 20 September, 5.30pm. Guest intro to be announced soon!
Wednesday, 23 September, 6.30pm
Augusto Góngora, a veteran Chilean journalist and prominent chronicler of the crimes of the Pinochet regime, and Paulina Urrutia, actress, activist and politician, have been a tight-knit loving couple for over 20 years. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s eight years ago, and now they both face the inexorable and accelerating descent of his physical and mental powers together. The Eternal Memory is both an inquiry into human dignity in old age and adversity and into the mechanisms of individual and collective remembrance.
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