At Sheffield DocFest this year, one film stood head and shoulders above the rest. A Child of My Own, directed by Maite Alberdi, captivated audiences, sparked countless conversations and left a lasting impression on everyone who saw it. It arrives on Netflix on 13 August.
The film follows a young Mexican woman who fakes a pregnancy, only to become trapped in an ever-growing web of deceit. As events unfold, the story becomes so astonishing that it feels almost impossible to believe it isn’t fiction – yet every moment is true.
Alberdi has established herself as one of documentary cinema’s most distinctive voices, earning two Academy Award nominations and widespread acclaim. When she visited Sheffield to present the film, I caught up with her to discuss A Child of My Own, along with some of the films that have shaped her remarkable career.
How did you come across this incredible story?
I first met Alejandra, the woman at the heart of this story, when I was doing some research and just became obsessed with her story. How can a woman fake a pregnancy and not be found out? As her pretence went on, more and more people ended up being involved and affected by it, and the fallout from what she ended up doing was unbelievable.
She had had several miscarriages, but wasn’t offered any help with the toll this took on her mental health. As she was recovering on the miscarriage ward, she was even placed with mothers and their newborn babies. It was made much worse because of the expectation from family to have children in Mexican society.
There were so many points in her story where someone should have reached out or stepped in to help her, but she was left to cope totally on her own.
Did the story challenge the way you think about documentary storytelling?
I studied cinema before making documentaries, and my training focused on the craft of fictional storytelling. The one thing they teach you is how the hero has to go on some sort of journey, and change in some way.
When you’re making a documentary, you realise that this rarely happens in real life. As you’ll see in this film, despite everything, some people never change and are all the more fascinating for it. As much as this is a story about one person’s choices, it’s also a story of how the social system in Mexico failed.
I really want the film to speak to women in Latin America about the heavy and pervasive social pressure to conform and meet expectations, which is so hard and so common, but so rarely discussed.
Your films all seem to be characterised by you showing the audience an intimate portrait of small worlds, like for example your first feature, The Lifeguard, and later on in The Grown-Ups.
The Lifeguard follows a man who works at the most dangerous beach in Chile, and who is afraid of water. He doesn’t see this as a problem, as his job is mainly to prevent, not to save. His partner takes naps all day, but luckily is also the one who is very good at the rescues.
It is all about building a relationship with the people you are filming. I have to really love them, as I spend so much time with them. And also in the film I restrict the filming so we never see the sea. The Grown-Ups is about a group of people with Down’s syndrome, who are in their 50s but still go to school, and are still treated like children. No one features in the film who doesn’t have Down’s syndrome. I restricted this deliberately to show how they are living in a world totally isolated from society for their entire lives
I understand you have worked with the same crew for the last 15 years.
Yes, all of us know what to do and film intuitively. I look at filmmakers who make both fiction films and documentary films as artists, but artists working in very different ways. One is a painter, the other a sculptor.
Fiction directors have a wide canvas, where they add information to construct their characters, adding colour until the character appears. Documentary directors do completely the opposite. I am faced with a big rock in front of me – reality.
Reality is so big that you can’t film everything. I take away the rock until the character appears. You need to trust that time will give you the scenes you need, but you need to be patient to let the story tell itself. You cannot moderate life.
