This year the award ceremony took longer than expected, but it arrived: the 2021 Oscar ceremony is this Sunday, and Chile is hoping that the name of El Agente Topo will be heard throughout the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood as the winner for Best Documentary.
This nomination represents several milestones for Chilean cinema. Not only is it the only Latin American film nominated this year, but for the first time a Chilean documentary is part of the Best Documentary category. In addition, Maite Alberdi is the first Chilean woman to be nominated for an Oscar.
Here 10 characters who have marked the history of Chilean cinema in their different roles give their opinions on the film.
Sebastián Lelio, director, screenwriter, producer and editor. Among his most relevant films are Gloria (2013) and Una mujer fantástica (2017) winner of the Oscar for best foreign film in 2018.
"Agent Mole is an intelligent and moving film, as tender as it is cruel. Its vocation to expand what we understand by documentary is liberating. It is a great achievement for Chilean documentary and a reminder of its excellent tradition. I wish all the best to Maite Alberdi and her team of daring and talented women".
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Andrés Wood, director of Historias de fútbol ( 1997), Machuca (2004), Violeta se fue a los cielos (2011), Araña (2019), among others.
"I am deeply glad that, through El Agente Topo, Maite Alberdi has become known in the world. It is a beautiful, profound and very original film, which consolidates a larger work that is the sum of all her other documentaries. I am sure that this is just one more step in a trajectory that will continue to give us great emotions. I am already looking forward to his next film.
Image: Nos Magazine
Julio Rojas, screenwriter of En la cama ( 2005), Mi mejor enemigo (2005), La vida de los peces ( 2010), La memoria del agua ( 2015), and others.
"I think Agent Mole should win because it is an outstanding exploration of our human frailty. An octogenarian who shows us that we can all be heroes, regardless of age. The bittersweet portrait of the loneliness in which many older adults live in Chile reminds us of the value of a group that we should integrate, not discard. The trajectory of Maite Alberdi, a director who consistently brings the silent, forgotten and marginalized back to the forefront of observation and conversation in a sensitive and acute manner. Agent Mole is a fresh breath of empathy, shelter and caring in a world that often delights in the opposite."
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Antonia Herrera, art director of the short film Historia de un Oso (2014)winner of the Oscar for Best Short Film 2016.
"In Chile we are very excited and proud of El Agente Topo. It is an incredible film that I hope will win on Sunday. Maite is a tremendously talented director who has made great films all worthy of awards. I was lucky enough to work with her on La Once and she has a wonderful dedication and eye for detail. It is incredible that she is the one representing Chile and all Chilean women filmmakers at the Oscars, she is the first Chilean director to make it there. A great achievement in a great year for women directors, with two women nominated for best director, Chloé Zhao and Emerald Fennell. I hope there are more and more of us because representation matters. It matters that we have those opportunities and that presence in film."
Image: El Mercurio
Juan de Dios Larraín, producer of Fábula and of more than 30 other films, including No ( 2012), Gloria (2013), Neruda ( 2016), Ema (2019) and the 2017 Oscar winner for Best International Film, A Fantastic Woman.
"Agent Mole is a very special documentary. It is conceived as a thriller, which leads to a story of emotional ties. It teaches us how important it is to love and care for our parents as they age. In that sense, the documentary sets itself up as a political artifact, making it worthy of all the medals the industry hands out."
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Ascanio Cavallo, writtenr and film critic, author of Guía para hablar de cine: 30 películas esenciales del cine clásico, among others.among others.
"Agent Mole has the great merit of putting us face to face with the problem of being old, perhaps the deepest and most dramatic problem we will all have, closely following death. To be old means to be a problem: this is what The Mole Agent makes painfully visible, with the power and limitations that constitute the nature of cinema".
Ernesto Ayala has been writing film reviews for 20 years in the main Chilean media. "Cine chileno del siglo XXI" is a selection of his work.
"In intemperate and erratic times like the ones we live in, El Agente Topo is an island of humanity, in a small world where the old values of encounter, coexistence and understanding not only survive, but are central. In that sense, Maite Alberdi is indebted to John Ford, Howard Hawks and a certain classic cinema that reminds us that a community is knotted in the food that is shared, in the songs and poems that are sung and in the celebrations and dances that are enjoyed as a group. Amidst so much noise, turmoil and speed, amidst so much cause to shout about, Agent Mole reminds us of what we are really made of. That he has turned to a stage on the social margins - a home for the elderly - to do so only makes it more eloquent.
Rodrigo González, journalist and film critic with 20 years of experience covering Chilean cinema.
"Agent Mole has the great strength of possessing an endearing, charismatic protagonist, a true movie character. I wouldn't be surprised if he plays an important role when the members of the Hollywood Academy have to vote. The film is more about Don Sergio's wanderings than about the reality of nursing homes. He, unlike the nursing home inmates, knows a lot about what the filmmaker is planning, and that's why El Agente Topo is outside the bounds of the traditional documentary. That is why it is original and at times seems like fiction. It could very well have been among the five nominees for Best International Film. I think it should win for its disruptive proposal, for its great protagonist and for the director's talent to approach with different eyes a reality (that of nursing homes) that is often depressing".
Image: Álvaro González
Isabel Plant, journalist specialized in culture and entertainment for important media. Co-founder of Mujeres Bacanas.
"There are two things that make El Agente Topo stand out and worthy of an Oscar. First, Maite Alberdi is putting the invisibilized in the spotlight, she had done it with the elderly in La Once and now she points to the background of loneliness in old age, an issue that due to the pandemic is back in vogue worldwide. What do we do with people in nursing homes, how do they live, why do we forget them when they are still alive. So I think it is a much more political film than it appears to be at first glance and that is something very common in Maite Alberdi's films and places her as a very intelligent and important director, not only at the level of Chilean cinema, but of world cinema. Secondly, it is a film that has an enormous heart, Maite manages to make us fall in love with the main character, she manages to turn him into a hero, she makes us start laughing and end up crying inconsolably and that not only speaks of her mastery as a director, but also speaks of her intelligence as a storyteller. Agent Mole is a film with important political themes for society, but it is also an endearing film that conquers you in the deepest connection one can have with cinema, which is empathy and emotion".
