![]() The makeup of Chilean families has changed in the last few decades-the number of people per household dropped from 5.4 in 1960 to 3.6 in 2002-and the proportion of older people living by themselves and in nursing homes has thus increased significantly. Cultural shifts have also contributed to major stress on this population. While they’ve been neglected by the state, the lack of a social safety net for older Chileans has forced them to disproportionately rely on immediate family members. As life expectancy has risen, however, the returns from that investment have proved to be too low to sustain a livable income, and now 80 percent of pensioners are living off less than the minimum wage. ![]() ![]() A remnant of the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, the Chilean functions as a defined contribution scheme, which requires workers to pay 10 percent of their wages each month to for-profit funds. In 2019, violent protests broke out in the country against rising social inequality, with a particular focus on the pension system, which was previously held up as a continental model. In Chile in particular, recent social unrest has demonstrated the urgency of the problem. Governments across the region are reassessing their policies for this growing sector of the population. That conversation is timely Latin America is one of the fastest-aging regions in the developing world. For Alberdi, the crime genre is just a facade: Working within it allows The Mole Agent to set viewer expectations before ultimately subverting the clean, traditional crime story to take on the larger and messier conversation about society’s treatment of older people in Chile and beyond. Directed and written by Maite Alberdi, a filmmaker from Santiago whose work centers marginalized communities, The Mole Agent turns an anthropological lens toward nursing homes and society’s treatment of older people. And soon enough, Sergio, a sweet 83-year-old widower looking for something to occupy his time, is planted as a spy in the home.īut The Mole Agent isn’t exactly a crime story. A private detective conducts recruitment interviews for a spy to investigate an unusual case that has come across his desk: A woman wants to find out if her mother is being abused at a nursing home in El Monte, a suburb of Santiago. There’s the magnifying glass, the case files, the slatted shadows from the film noir tradition-the stage is set for a crime thriller. From the opening shots of The Mole Agent, the Chilean film nominated for best documentary feature at this year’s Academy Awards, viewers may feel that they can predict the next hour and a half.
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