A Child of My Own: Maite Alberdi’s tricksy documentary about a woman who stole a newborn paints moral grey areas with shades of pink

Pink is a cruel colour in Maite Alberdi’s A Child of My Own. Alejandra (Ale), the real-life subject of the Chilean director’s squirrelly docudrama (played in the film’s dramatisations by Ana Celeste), is usually seen in shades of blossom, with lips and cheeks flushed in pastel, embodying a hyperfeminine ideal of the ‘good wife’ for her husband Arturo (they are desperate for a baby, and pressure from her in-laws isn’t helping). 

When Ale is told by a doctor that she has miscarried for the third time, Alberdi frames her between two garish medical illustrations of foetuses floating in bright pink wombs – a foghorn signal for biology closing in. She steps out into an agonising inverse world familiar to anyone with fertility issues – a waiting room decorated with photos of rosy babies, populated by pregnant women who carry the hope she had ripped from her moments before. There she meets Mayra, a pregnant woman who’d rather not be. Alberdi bathes Ale in a beatific glow as she makes a proposition – she will take the baby and (though she doesn’t tell Mayra this part) fake a pregnancy of her own. The real Mayra later claimed there was no such ‘deal’ – that Ale kidnapped her newborn; as a result, in 2009 Ale was sentenced to over 13 years in prison. The story was a scandal in Ale’s native Mexico, and Ale’s account seemed too telenovela to be real. Then again, reality is a porous and squishy thing in Alberdi’s documentaries. 

Alberdi is interested in what she calls “spaces of fragility and vulnerability”. Her impish, Oscar-nominated documentary The Mole Agent (2020) followed Chilean actor Sergio Chamy as he infiltrated a care home to scope out suspicions of elder abuse. The Eternal Memory (2023) embedded in the lives of journalist Augusto Góngora and actor Paulina Urrutia, creating a loving portrait of a marriage redrawn by Augusto’s advancing dementia. Both films dealt in shifting perceptions, unreliable narrators, the notion of care and – in the case of The Mole Agent – what happens when we are not cared for. A Child of My Own shares these preoccupations, along with some of The Mole Agent’s tricksiness and playful subterfuge. Alberdi was researching another project at Santa Martha prison in Mexico City when she met Ale, an inmate at the time. Alberdi structured the film around her evolving realisations about her subject – unquestioned testimony that unravels as other perspectives are allowed in. While Ale’s version of events may not be true, her story involves many shades of grey (and pink). 

Home videos, CCTV footage, pixelated camera-phone clips and talking-head interviews are all at play in A Child of My Own. But at the centre of the film is a dramatisation, a ‘flashback’, based on the recollections of Ale and her husband Arturo, which documents Ale’s faking of her pregnancy at age 26 – a ruse she maintained by overeating. As Ale’s lies spiral, the colours heighten – Alberdi’s stylised tones looking as bright and unnatural as farmed salmon. The fake-out pregnancy plot is a favourite of the broader sort of comedy (Labor Pains, 2009; Kinda Pregnant, 2025), and Alberdi does find humour in the visual absurdity of a ‘pregnancy bump’ conceived with pastries. You can’t help but empathise with the sweet, expressive face of actress Ana Celeste, who has the big innocent eyes of a cartoon lamb. It’s a questionable move, to place so much focus on the perpetrator rather than the victim (the real Mayra is given too little screentime for the audience to connect), but Alberdi is out to make sense of Ale’s behaviour, not clear her name. 

After every loss, Ale was expected to bury her pain in a shallow grave and try again, to pin the future of her relationship and self-worth on something that can slip away without warning. The body keeps score, but it’s even better at keeping secrets, and Alberdi’s film shows just how far Ale had disappeared into her own fantasy. It helps us understand the circumstances Ale faced – how dehumanised she was by her husband and his family after pregnancy loss, when at her most vulnerable. They were prey to delusions of their own, weaponising old wives’ tales and blaming Ale for miscarriages over which she had no control. 

Her desire to have a child was compounded by overwhelming societal expectations. It’s telling that the place she found peace from that noise was in prison, surrounded by other women.

As 39-year-old Ale prepares for release, a glimpse of the Hello Kitty trinkets and pink photo frames inside her cell reveals that her personal style has influenced the look of Alberdi’s film all along. But the powder-puff haze that once filled the frame has dissipated. Life on the outside brings Ale disappointment as much as happiness – but this reality, and the tough choices it presents, are her own.

► A Child of My Own is in UK cinemas 7 August and will stream on Netflix UK from 13 August.