The In Her Place director moves from documentary to feature filmmaking with the Chilean crime drama.
Even in Maite Alberdi’s first foray into fictionalized storytelling, the twice Oscar-nominated director brings her long-standing passion for documentary to bear. In Her Place dramatizes the real-life story of lauded Chilean author María Carolina Geel who, in 1955, shot and killed her lover Roberto Pumarino Valenzuela in the midst of tea time at Santiago’s posh Hotel Crillón.
Geel was ultimately pardoned by the president, after outcry from prominent women in the country’s literary community, though it was never fully understood why she committed her crime. “In twentieth-century Chile, most of the women convicted of murder were pardoned only because they were women; to condemn them would have given them visibility,” says Alberdi. “The pardons always alluded to the madness of the female murderers, but no one really listened to their reasons.”
While the director offers no simple answers to the riddle of Valenzuela’s murder, she paints an illuminating portrait of María Carolina’s life, and that of women of the period, by centering her story on Mercedes (Elisa Zulueta) — a fictional secretary to the judge presiding over the author’s trial. Mercedes’s home with her husband and two teenage sons is reflective of 1950s Chile: Relied on and taken for granted, she is expected not only to work at the courthouse but also to come home and perform all domestic chores.
When Mercedes is brought in to support María Carolina’s trial and pick up belongings at her apartment, this ordinary wife comes face-to-face with an independent lifestyle she never thought possible for a woman. Most significantly, it’s apparent to Mercedes that María Carolina (Francisca Lewin) rejects all domesticity, and — even in this morbid context — the possibility of such freedom in her own life begins to transform her. “All women can identify with the need for a room of one’s own,” offers Alberdi, “the need for a personal, creative, and quiet place.”
Here, Alberdi, who’s directed documentaries The Mole Agent (2020) and The Eternal Memory (2023), discusses her approach to the poignant and fictionalized narrative In Her Place, which has been named Chile’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards and the Goya Awards.
An edited version of the conversation follows.
Queue: How did you decide to bring María Carolina Geel’s story to the big screen and why did you approach it from the perspective of the fictional character Mercedes?
Maite Alberdi: The idea arose from the book The Murderers. Its perspective on murderous women from the last century, understanding how women were judged and how their crimes made them invisible and silenced them, attracted me. The author Alia Trabucco Zerán’s thesis about invisibility and how women were seen when they were judged and the idea of the abnormality of the crime of women was interesting: Women do not kill, and if they do, it is because they are crazy. We tried to understand Geel, her motive.
Tell us about the casting process. What did Elisa Zulueta and Francisca Lewin bring to their characters?
MA: Elisa and Francisca have very different styles and processes. In the case of María Carolina, Francisca had to work with the enigma of the actual writer. Even though everything is based on real testimonials and files, she is a very enigmatic character who is difficult to understand and communicates in very few words.
Mercedes, on the other hand, is an observer of the triggering action by María Carolina. They are different beings: the captivating personality of the writer versus an invisible woman that will later be seen. The challenge of casting was to find actors to portray a visibility that had nothing to do with being seen by others, but more to do with beginning to see oneself in a way that aligned with the self-discovery in the film.
What were the main challenges of making a movie set in the 50s?
MA: It’s not enough to say that it was a different period — we have to identify what kinds of things we still question today, which issues have not been resolved.
The most challenging aspect is that the ideas are not specific to that decade, but transcend time. Then, there’s the more practical aspect of recreating the period in a country that has conserved very little, a great achievement of our art and costume design team.
What was it like directing your first narrative feature film? Which elements of your documentary filmmaking career can be seen in this movie?
MA: In Her Place was made based on a documentary investigation: Alia’s book is nonfiction, and the files are real. Since it is based in reality, I took the perspective of looking at a historical case from the present. This film is like the documentary I would have made at the time of Geel’s case. It was a historic reconstruction of real testimonials, facts, and files, so I used a lot of the same methodology I practice with documentary filmmaking.
What message do you want to convey with In Her Place?
MA: Every woman is in search of spaces of freedom. Here is a story of a woman looking at another woman who has conquered her freedom, even in jail, because that is her personal space. Freedom is relative; women build it by seeing each other — by having other women to look up to, to see yourself in, talk to, and share stories with. All of these elements help us to develop ourselves.
