Silently and discreetly, as she usually prefers, Maite Alberdi spent the last few years filming a documentary in Mexico, her first feature film outside of Chile. The director of The Mole Agent (2020) and The Eternal Memory (2023) delved into a story that crosses motherhood, machismo, and social reintegration, and processed it through a hybrid nature film, on the edge between documentary and fiction.
Available on Netflix’s catalog since this Thursday the 13th, A Child of Her Own begins with Alejandra, a Mexican woman who marries a man named Arturo. The young woman must deal with the pain of several miscarriages and the pressures from her husband and family to become a mother. In a moment of desperation, without telling anyone, she decides to fake a pregnancy, a lie that extends because she manages to convince both Arturo and her close ones as well as doctors.
The seed of that deception originates when one day, in the waiting room of the same hospital where she works, she meets Mayra, a woman who is expecting a child but wishes to give it up for adoption. Both agree that when the day of delivery arrives, Alejandra will keep the baby. But the plan goes wrong: the case gains national notoriety and Alejandra and Arturo are arrested and accused of having kidnapped the newborn and end up in jail.
With actress Ana Celeste Montalvo Peña and actor Armando Espitia in the lead roles, the film structures that first part as fiction. Or, as Alberdi likes to say, as “a staged scene” supported by Alejandra’s testimony, using a palette of pastel colors and a narration that softens her degree of responsibility.
Then, about halfway through the runtime, A Child of Her Own jumps to the present of those involved and becomes a more conventional documentary. The protagonist – whose full name is Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza – is serving a sentence at the Santa Martha Acatitla Women’s Social Reintegration Center, where she has managed to build affectionate relationships with other inmates.
After years deprived of freedom, she faces her past actions and her version of events crumbles as interviews with other characters emerge, such as the real Arturo, the real Mayra, and other characters surrounding the real story (the doctor, for example, refused to participate).
Alberdi came across her while making Free to Laugh, the documentary series that Prime Video premiered in 2023 where Mexican comedian Sofía Niño de Rivera gave stand-up workshops in Mexico City prisons. The curious form of A Child of Her Own – she has insisted – is the product of her own relationship with Alejandra and her partial (and later total) knowledge of the case’s details.
A Child of Her Own premiered at the 2026 Berlin Festival and garnered favorable reviews from the international press.
The Hollywood Reporter celebrated that the director “continues blurring, smudging, and playfully toying with the boundaries between fiction and reality,” assuring that the film is “at times very funny and then suddenly moving.” It also emphasized that the work composing the first part “bears no resemblance to the tasteless reconstructions often seen in television documentaries” due “in part to Alberdi’s skillful storytelling.”
“The story is undeniably fascinating, and Alberdi once again demonstrates her ability to get to the heart of the matter and make it relevant to a wider audience,” argued Screen Daily. According to that outlet, although “she uses the same effective combination of intimacy and universality” as in The Mole Agent and The Eternal Memory, this time she achieves “less impactful results.”
Although it highlighted the filmmaker as a “delicate and emotional documentarian,” Variety expressed some doubts about her latest work. “As the film moves toward a hopeful final note that raises as many questions as answers, one wonders if a more straightforward documentary narrative would have been more beneficial,” it stated.
Less convinced, the Argentine portal Otros Cines indicated that the filmmaker “gets ‘trapped’ in the middle of that structure, thus losing much of the subtlety, nuances, and charm of previous works.”
And it added: “A Child of Her Own is made with craftsmanship and has some valuable areas, but it also opens certain questions regarding the evolution of a director’s career who here decided to leave her native Chile for a project written by others and in which she appears more detached and less sensitive than usual.”
Recently, on the occasion of its arrival in British cinemas, Sight and Sound magazine described the film as “stylized” and mainly identified virtues in the approach it adopts. “It is a questionable decision to focus so much on the aggressor instead of the victim (the real Mayra appears very little on screen, which prevents the audience from connecting with her), but Alberdi seeks to understand Ale’s behavior, not to clear her name,” it held.
“A Child of Her Own represents a refreshing foray into true crime stories, delving into less violent and more intimate enigmas,” pointed out The Guardian, which labeled it as “a brazenly inquisitive docudrama.”
Alberdi’s feature is one of the 17 titles seeking to become Mexico’s representative at the Oscars. The decision will fall to the members of the Mexican Academy of Film Arts and Sciences.
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