The CCTV footage of the hospital corridor is grainy but you can make out a young woman carrying an oversized gift bag. Nothing unusual there. Except that inside the bag is a newborn baby girl, just hours old. And the woman carrying the bag, walking out of the hospital’s main entrance, past two security guards who are idly chatting, is not the baby’s mother.
Her name is Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza, known to everyone as Alejandra. When film-maker Maite Alberdi met her in a low-security Mexican prison, Alejandra was in the final year of a 13-year jail sentence for snatching the baby. Alberdi listened rapt as Alejandra told her story: “Everything she was telling me was extraordinary, stranger than fiction.”
It was a tale full of drama and intrigue. Alejandra was 17 and already pregnant when she married her husband Arturo in a fairytale wedding. She’d always wanted children and Arturo was desperate for a son. But then she had a miscarriage, and then another. Still only in her 20s, she underwent IVF. After she became pregnant for the third time, she miscarried again – but kept this miscarriage a secret and faked the rest of her pregnancy.
As Alejandra told her story, the twists kept coming. She worked in admin at a hospital, where she met a single mother, Mayra, who was pregnant but did not want to keep her baby. The two women struck a deal: after giving birth, Mayra would hand her baby over to Alejandra. Five months later, Alejandra arrived at the hospital and collected the baby girl. But something went wrong and the police were called. Alejandra was arrested hours later at a nearby hotel and the baby was returned to Mayra.
“For two years I only heard Alejandra’s version of what happened,” says Alberdi, who is Chilean and earned an Oscar nomination for her 2020 film The Mole Agent. She continued to visit Alejandra in prison in Mexico and applied for transcripts of her criminal trial. The process was slow, but finally she received the court bundle. “When I saw the evidence, I thought: ‘Oh no, I was so wrong.’ I crashed into reality.”
Alejandra’s story did not fit the facts. In her witness statements, Mayra said she actually met Alejandra for the first time after she gave birth, when Alejandra walked on to the hospital ward posing as a social worker. There never had been any arrangement between them. Instead, Mayra faced the unimaginable terror of her newborn baby being kidnapped from her hospital cot. The evidence was on her side.
Alberdi could not ignore what she was reading. Did she think about ditching the film? “Yes! I wasn’t sure if I could continue. I was really disappointed.” But the thought of doing that must have been difficult, after spending so much time with Alejandra, being so invested in her story? “Si, yes. I trusted her, but my gut feeling was that I believed the evidence. It was hard.”
Did she confront Alejandra? “Yes! She denied everything, and she continues saying that until today.”
Despite the shock revelation, Alberdi stuck with the film. She says that from the beginning, what she connected to in the story was the pressure that drove Alejandra to the edge – to conceal her miscarriage and pretend that she was still pregnant. “It was not about the case; it was about the situation. I was more interested in why she faked a pregnancy. It was a question of the social pressure of motherhood in Mexico, in Latin America.”
Her Netflix documentary A Child of My Own begins with a dramatic reconstruction starring actor Ana Celeste as Alejandra. The story has all the qualities of a Greek tragedy. But the way Alejandra recounted it was more like a soap opera, over the top and full of melodrama. And that’s how Alberdi has filmed it, depicting Alejandra’s version of what happened in the style of a Mexican telenovela. She guesses it’s about 80% accurate. And it is hilarious in places – farcical and wacky as Alejandra binge eats to gain weight and fakes an ultrasound scan. “When she told me the story, we were laughing.”
It’s funny until it isn’t. At her lavish baby shower, surrounded by family and friends, Alejandra looks dazed and alone. “You know, she went to yoga pregnancy classes,” says Alberdi. “She wasn’t just acting for others. She really wanted to live it.”
Does Alberdi think Alejandra came to believe her own deception? “Completely. And if you see the archive footage, it’s not a fat woman, it’s a pregnant woman. So it’s like she did have a psychological pregnancy. She wanted to believe, and at some point, she was living that lie.”
In the dramatisation, Alberdi reveals the pressure Alejandra felt to have a baby. After each of her miscarriages, she is castigated as a failure. Her mother-in-law blames her: “You should have been more careful.” Her husband Arturo is sympathetic up to a point, but his disappointment adds to her guilt. Alberdi is at pains to point out that she is not trying to justify Alejandra’s crime but to understand the context.
Has the situation changed for women since 2009, when Alejandra faked her pregnancy, I ask. Before the sentence is finished, Alberdi cuts in: “In Mexico and in Latin America, no. There is the same pressure to be married and have kids.” At a recent screening in Mexico, a Q&A was derailed as women in the audience stood up to share their stories of struggling with fertility and the pressure to have a baby.
As a mother of an eight-year-old, Alberdi says she too is aware of constant judgment: “Everybody has an opinion about how you are living motherhood, all the time.” She has lost count of the number of times that people at film festivals – “mostly men” – will ask her who is looking after her son.
Alberdi’s film crashes down to earth, just as she did. In the second part of A Child of My Own, the reconstruction ends and Alberdi interviews Alejandra and her husband Arturo, who was also arrested and spent two years in prison before being acquitted at trial. She speaks to the judge at Alejandra’s trial, and a psychologist. There is also an interview with Mayra, the baby’s mother, whose fury and trauma are still raw. For her, a 50-year prison sentence wouldn’t have been long enough, Alberdi says. “She suffered so much. I understand that she cannot forgive Alejandra.”
Alberdi also interviewed Mayda’s baby, who is now a healthy and happy teenager. She joked that her parents are over-protective and won’t let her go to parties in case she’s kidnapped. It was a good interview but in the end Alberdi decided not to include it in her film: “I didn’t want to victimise her when she’s not a victim. Her friends don’t know. In school she would just become the girl who was kidnapped. I didn’t want to create an issue in her adolescence.”
A Child of My Own is not a typical Netfix true-crime documentary, nor is Alberdi the kind of director you’d expect to make one. She has built a reputation for the kind of documentaries that premiere at prestigious film festivals. The Mole Agent followed a spy in a care home for the elderly, revealing the loneliness of residents. The Eternal Memory was an intimate study of a celebrity couple in Chile coping with Alzheimer’s disease. Alberdi made her fiction debut with the 2024 drama In Her Place.
I’m curious if she watches true crime. “Yes,” Alberdi replies, not exactly brimming with enthusiasm. She proceeds diplomatically: “I enjoy it as a viewer, but I don’t connect emotionally.”
The trouble is, she says, that we live in an age of snap judgments and instant opinion. But she never has an instant opinion. “El matiz …” she frowns, pulling out her phone to translate a word from Spanish “Nuance! True crime is the opposite of nuance. Everything is more complex in reality.”
