“A child of my own” interview with director Maite Alberdi

Presented in Special Presentation at the 76th Berlinale, “A Child of My Own” (Un hijo propio) is the new feature-length documentary by Chilean director Maite Alberdi, already known to international audiences for “The Mole Agent“, her Oscar-nominated work.

The film follows Alejandra, a woman whose profound desire to become a mother and the relentless pressure from her family and surroundings drive her to fake a pregnancy — a simple lie that spirals into a complex charade sustained for months, until an irreversible line is crossed and a media scandal makes the deception impossible to maintain.

Back at Berlinale

Maite Alberdi returns to a festival she considers a natural home for her kind of filmmaking, one that privileges new narrative forms, social inquiry and human stories over spectacle. Her previous documentary Memoria Infinita screened in Panorama Documentary, and “A Child of My Own” feels equally at home in a space that, as the director puts it, welcomes films that look not only at politics but at people, at life, at the invisible pressures that shape it.

The starting point: a story stronger than fiction

The genesis of the film was a real encounter. Maite Alberdi met Alejandra and listened to her story, a story so extreme, so unbelievable, that it immediately sparked both fascination and a deeper set of questions. “I always say that reality is stronger than fiction, but in this case it was really extreme,” she explains. Beyond the sensational events, what drew the director in was the emotional and social core of the story: the weight of motherhood, the absence of freedom in reproductive decisions, the way social pressure shapes and ultimately destroys a woman’s choices.

A Shakespearean tragedy

For Maite Alberdi, Alejandra’s story is nothing less than a modern tragedy. A woman who wanted only to be good, to fulfill her role, to meet the expectations of her husband, her family, her community and who, without intending harm, ended up at the very bottom of society, in prison. “It’s not a person in jail, it’s a woman in jail,” she says, pointing to the particular cruelty of that condition: a woman in prison breaks every rule of what a woman is supposed to be.

The failure, she insists, is not only Alejandra’s. The judge in the film spells it out clearly: a mother who lost two children and received no mental healthcare; a family that kept demanding a child; a doctor who granted maternity leave; a hospital that failed her; a husband who didn’t see what was happening. “There is a social responsibility here,” Maite Alberdi says, “and she paid her debt with society — 13 years in jail. But how is society paying its debt with her?”

The pressure that never ends

The film resonates far beyond Alejandra’s extreme case because it touches something universal: the guilt that comes with motherhood, the impossible standard that society sets and that no woman can fully meet.

“You feel guilty all the time” Maite Alberdi reflects, “because you are not being the mom that society tells you that you have to be. You’re supposed to have your baby in your arms, give them food, be in a garden with flowers, happy and you only want to cry. And nobody told you that.”

It is a pressure, she adds, that never ends, from the desire to become a mother, through pregnancy, through every stage of raising a child.

A documentary that uses all the tools of cinema

Maite Alberdi is clear about how she defines the film: it is a documentary, not a docu-fiction. But it is a documentary that makes full use of everything cinema has to offer today: reconstructed scenes with actors, observational footage, interviews, real archive material.

“The great thing about documentary today is that we have so much freedom with materials” she says. The approach was, as always for her, character-driven: you find the person first, then you discover the best way to tell their story. In Alejandra’s case, every element was necessary.

A filmmaker always in motion

“A Child of My Own” sits comfortably within Maite Alberdi‘s filmography: a body of work consistently drawn to fragility, intimacy and the spaces society doesn’t give us to speak about vulnerability. Each film, she says, grows from the previous one: “I need to learn something in each one that I want to explore in the next.“

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