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Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi, whose heartfelt documentaries “The Mole Agent” and “The Eternal Memory” earned her Academy Award nominations, agreed to step into the world of scripted fiction when Netflix and Pablo Larraín’s production company Fabula sent her the 2019 book “When Women Kill” (“Las Homicidas”) by Alia Trabucco Zerán.
The resulting screen adaption, “In Her Place” (“El lugar de la otra”), puts Alberdi back on the awards trail as Chile’s Oscar entry for the Best International Feature Film.
The original book details four real-life cases of women who committed murder but were pardoned during a time when the death penalty was still implemented in Chile. “It was the first nonfiction book by a writer who usually writes fiction. And this is my first fiction set in a non-fiction world,” Alberdi told IndieWire in Spanish via video call. “The crisscrossing was interesting.”
More than the specifics of the stories, what attracted Alberdi to the material was its concrete thesis, allowing her to approach the project like her previous works.
“In documentary, you always start with a theme and an intention rather than with a storyline,” she said. “Condemning female murderers meant making them visible and freeing them from their role as good women. Instead, they were treated as mental health patients, and no one bothered to inquire about their reasons. They were judged differently.”
Out of the quartet of narratives, Alberdi and screenwriters Inés Bortagaray and Paloma Salas chose the one about writer María Carolina Geel, who shot her romantic partner to death in 1955, as it dealt with gender and class. It was Geel’s status in the intellectual elite that amplified attention for the case and caught the eye of Nobel Prize-winning Gabriela Mistral, who requested the pardon.
For Alberdi, absolving the female killers of their crimes had sexist implications. “If they had been given the death penalty, their cases would probably have become well-known, but forgiving them meant silencing them,” she said. “They wanted them to go live their lives and for no one to know about this matter, to keep women ‘where they belong.’”
The testimonies that appear on screen, as well as the reaction of the press at the time and even Geel’s letters, were taken directly from the actual case files. “This is the movie I would have made if these characters had been alive to tell me the story,” explained the director.
‘In Her Place’©Netflix/Courtesy Everett CollectionGiven how grounded in reality “In Her Place” is, the obvious choice would have been to make the killer the protagonist. But Geel never spoke about her motives and didn’t ask to be pardoned. And though she wrote a book during her time in prison, titled “Cárcel de mujeres,” it doesn’t include a confession or details about the violent incident. It’s a sociological portrait of what she witnessed while in prison with other women.
“Making her the protagonist would mean to give her a voice, but she is a character who never wanted to talk,” said Alberdi. “To give her a voice I would have to judge her far more than if I’m just observing her.” The director and writers opted for a fictional main character, Mercedes (played by Elisa Zulueta), a married mother who works for the judge assigned to Geel’s case, and whose chaotic homelife reflects a power imbalance across gender lines.
As the trial unfolds — and with Geel (actress Francisca Lewin) in a comfortable private cell — Mercedes gains access to Geel’s elegant apartment and expensive wardrobe. The murderess’ abode becomes a secret refuge for Mercedes away from her sons and husband who fail to see her beyond her labor.
What fascinates Mercedes about Geel is precisely what attracted Alberdi to the case: Geel is a woman with the freedom to write, to assert her personal space — in this case, her own flat — while living with an impetus to break all established canons imposed on women.
“Mercedes is someone who is learning about freedoms that are not conventional for someone like her at that time,” added Alberdi. Geel’s apartment is the materialization of freedom for Mercedes because it allows her to momentarily exist, divorced from her roles as a mother, a wife, or an employee. For Alberdi, that need for a personal haven recalls Virginia Woolf’s influential essay “A Room of One’s Own.”
“[Woolf] says, ‘I was able to write because I had money and I had the privilege of having a space that allowed me to write. But not all women have that.’ In Latin America, women have conquered many battles on the public front, but very few wins in domestic life.”
‘In Her Place’©Netflix/Courtesy Everett CollectionThat “In Her Place” is a period piece required not only substantial resources but also the expertise of key craftspeople to recreate the spaces and clothing of the mid-20th century in a country like Chile that, according to Alberdi, “has preserved very little of its heritage,” and where many old buildings have collapsed as the result of earthquakes. Muriel Parra, the costume designer behind several of Larraín’s films (including “Neruda”), and seasoned production designer Rodrigo Bazaes (“El Conde”) were part of Alberdi’s team.
“I am very thankful to Netflix because I believe that in terms of budget, a period film like this would be unthinkable in Latin America without a streamer like them,” Alberdi said. “It’s a type of production that one cannot imagine with local public funds.”
In making her fiction debut, Alberdi experienced a sense of control absent from directing documentaries, where she is subordinate to reality and has to wait for it to unfold. With “In Her Place,” she got closer to the “godlike” figure of the director described to her in film school.
“It was kind of relaxing for me because, in documentary, I never know what is going to happen, and I never know how I am going to finish filming. In fiction, having a script, filming what the pages said, and knowing things could be solved because they were in our hands, seemed very different to me than dealing with people who are not actors, who are giving their testimony and whose reality I’m bearing witness to.”
Alberdi thinks the director’s role in fiction and documentary is different. Working on “In Her Place,” she was reminded of François Truffaut’s “Day for Night,” as she had to constantly make decisions and respond to the questions of multiple collaborators.
“This film invited me to jump across more genres and to make riskier choices,” Alberdi added. “I’m probably going to continue making documentaries but with much more extreme fiction components.”
In Her Place is now streaming on Netflix.
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