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‘The Eternal Memory’ Review: Delicate Alzheimer’s Doc Balances Personal Reflection and Historical Consciousness

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variety.com

Guy Lodge Film Critic Through films as varied as “The Father,” “Dick Johnson is Dead” and “Relic,” dementia and neurodegenerative disease have been extensively portrayed on screen in recent years — a subgenre that carries a trigger warning for anyone with off-screen experience of the subject.

For those who think they cannot stomach one more, Maite Alberdi’s “The Eternal Memory” treats inexorably sad material with a lighter, more lyrical approach than most — focusing less on the day-to-day ravages of living with Alzheimer’s than on the slippery, transient concept of memory itself, as formed, held and lost both in the individual mind and a wider collective consciousness.

Key to the film’s thesis is that its subject is Augusto Góngora, a veteran Chilean political journalist who labored through the 1970s and 1980s 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, “The Eternal Memory” is not as densely conceptual or intellectual a work as, say, Patricio Guzmán’s “Nostalgia for the Light,” which mapped Pinochet’s legacy in literally astronomical terms.

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