MTV Documentary Films Releases Trailer for ‘The Eternal Memory,’ Documentary Oscar Contender (EXCLUSIVE)

MTV Documentary Films has released a first look teaser for The Eternal Memory, a look at love and Alzheimers disease that won the grand jury prize for world documentary at this years Sundance.

A U.S. theatrical release kicks off on Aug. 11 in New York. It will be followed by engagements in Los Angeles and San Francisco on Aug. 18, with a limited national roll out to follow. Chilean filmmakerMaite Alberdi directed the movie, which could be a contender for the documentary Oscar. Alberdi is the Academy Award-nominated filmmaker behind The Mole Agent.

To that end, The Eternal Memory played at the Berlin Film Festival, where it was the runner up for the audience award. A robust international festival campaign is already in the works, including stops at CPH:DOX, Hot Docs, and DocAviv, Hamptons Summer Docs and DC DOX.

The Eternal Memory centers around Augusto Gngora and Paulina Urrutia, who have been together for a quarter of a century. Eight years ago, their lives were forever changed by Gngoras Alzheimers diagnosis. As one of Chiles most prominent cultural commentators and television presenters, who worked through the 1970s and 1980s to expose the Pinochet regime and later labored to ensure no one forgot those horrors, Gngora has built an archive of memory. The Eternal Memory begins to follow him as he focuses his work on his own life, trying to hold on to his identity with the help of Urrutia, a famous actress and Chilean Minister of Culture.

Varietys Guy Lodge praised the film, writing in his review that it treats inexorably sad material with a lighter, more lyrical approach than most focusing less on the day-to-day ravages of living with Alzheimers than on the slippery, transient concept of memory itself, as formed, held and lost both in the individual mind and a wider collective consciousness.

The film is produced by Maite Alberdi, Juan De Dios Larran, Pablo Larran and Roco Jadue. Executive producers are Marcela Santibaez, Daniela Sandoval, Nicholas Hooper, Julie Goldman, Christopher Clements, Chandra Jessee and Rebecca Lichtenfeld.

Watch the trailer below: