When the Desire for Motherhood Turns Into a Crime

This week, Alejandro Riera takes us from a dystopian housing development in Uruguay to the beaches of Veracruz, Mexico, for a colonial-set hybrid doc, and, finally, into a story of motherhood, deception, and the crushing expectations placed on women. His review of Maite Alberdi’s Mexican documentary “Un hijo propio” looks beyond the twists of a true crime story to examine the pressures that can drive someone to construct an elaborate lie.

Happy Watching,

— Vanessa

Uruguayan filmmaker Lucía Garibaldi’s second feature is set in a housing development that seems suspended in time. 18-year-old Elisa is the last young person left in her community; most of her peers have been sent to the North where “history is being rewritten,” and no one ever returns. Elisa has been selected to go, but she begins to doubt the promise of a better life once she learns that youth has become a commodity for those running this mythical North.

“A Bright Future” is playing on August 21 at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image.

A nameless conquistador (superbly played by Eduardo San Juan Breña) walks the beaches of Veracruz, 499 years after his ship sank in the Gulf of Mexico. Disoriented, this living ghost decides to follow Cortez’s route towards Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City) in hopes of reuniting with his people. He loses his voice after berating a group of primary school students; in his wanderings, he has no choice but to listen to the stories of those who have suffered and resisted the physical, political, and social violence inflicted on Mexico’s indigenous population throughout the centuries. Rodrigo Reyes’ widescreen hybrid documentary is an antidote to the triumphalist tone of many epic films about conquerors and the conquered.

Streaming on Amazon Prime, Kanopy, and Google Play.

— By Alejandro Riera

The question is unavoidable. In-laws and parents ask it minutes after a happily wedded couple says their vows: "When are you going to give me grandchildren?" More often than not, that question prioritizes the male over the female in our culture: nietecitos or hijos are the nouns most often used. As time passes, the question is asked more frequently, insistently, as if there were something wrong with the couple, especially the bride.

It is the question that drives Eleanor Alejandra Marín Mendoza (or Ale, as she prefers to be called) to take drastic measures after meeting a woman who wants to abort her second pregnancy at the hospital where Ale works. To live a lie that will send her to jail. A quick Google search can tell you the whole sordid affair, but it would just scratch the surface of a story that often defies the whole notion that truth is stranger than fiction. For Chilean director Maite Alberdi, truth is in the eye of the beholder in her first film shot in Mexico, the hybrid documentary “Un hijo propio” (“A Child of My Own”).

Unlike most true crime documentaries, Alberdi (“The Mole Agent,” “The Eternal Memory,” “In Her Place”) eschews the salacious in favor of a stylized yet straightforward exploration of the social pressures of motherhood and their impact on women's mental health. Alberdi met Alejandra Marín in 2022, her final year of a 13-year prison sentence, while researching another project at the Santa Marta Acatitla women’s prison in Iztapalapa, Mexico City. Ale’s story was extraordinary, too good to be true.