All the qualities of a Greek tragedy … Ana Celeste as Alejandra in A Child of My Own. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix View image in fullscreen All the qualities of a Greek tragedy … Ana Celeste as Alejandra in A Child of My Own. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix Documentary films ‘She wasn’t acting, she wanted to live it’: how a fake pregnancy resulted in the wildest true crime film of the year Netflix documentary A Child of My Own tells the stranger-than-fiction story of a hospital worker who went to extreme lengths in her efforts to become a mother. Its director recounts their meetings in a Mexican prison
Prefer the Guardian on Google T he 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.
View image in fullscreen ‘Everybody has an opinion about motherhood’ … director Maite Alberdi. Photograph: John Phillips/Getty Images for BFI 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…