It’s been a busy week for Oscar-nominated documentary filmmakers Maite Alberdi and Kaouther Ben Hania. On Monday, Alberdi, director of The Eternal Memory, and Ben Hania, director of Four Daughters, joined fellow nominees at the glittering Oscar Nominees Luncheon at the Beverly Hilton. Today, they sit down with Deadline for the latest edition of our Doc Talk podcast.
In her film, Alberdi documents the relationship between two of Chile’s most prominent figures in the arts and journalism – Paulina Urrutia and Augusto Góngora – a love story that endured even as Augusto coped with advancing Alzheimer’s disease. The director explains why she sees The Eternal Memory as “an answer” to her previous film The Mole Agent, which earned Alberdi the first Oscar nomination of her career. (She also shares news on the fictional adaptation of The Mole Agent, confirming which Hollywood star has been cast as Sergio, the lovable man charged with investigating a possible crime at an old folks home).
In Four Daughters, Ben Hania explores a story from her native Tunisia — the case of a woman named Olfa who raised four girls, only to see the two eldest fall under the sway of radical Islamist ideology and join ISIS. The director tells us why she made the decision to incorporate actors into her film to play Olfa and her two oldest daughters in re-creations. She also talks about why Hind Sabri, a star of Arab cinema who took on the role of Olfa, felt afraid of the woman she was portraying. And Ben Hania explains why a male actor she hired walked off the set during one particularly intense scene.
This marks a return trip to the Academy Awards for Ben Hania as well as Alberdi. They were both nominated in 2021 – Alberdi for Documentary Feature and Ben Hania in International Feature for her narrative feature The Man Who Sold His Skin.
In the new episode of Doc Talk, we also revisit our interview from last fall with Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp, directors of the Oscar-nominated documentary Bobi Wine: The People’s President. And the titular Bobi Wine – the Ugandan pop star turned politician — joins us too – explaining what he wishes the filmmakers had left out of the documentary.
That’s on Doc Talk, the podcast co-hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s documentary editor. Doc Talk is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios, presented with support from National Geographic Documentary Films.