The Mole Agent
SKILLS: Narrative Campaigns, Marketing, Writing and Experience Design
THE WORK
Director Maite Alberdi’s second documentary to appear on POV was The Mole Agent, a movie about an octogenarian who’s hired to “infiltrate” a Chilean nursing home when one of the residents’ daughters suspects foul play. Sergio Chamy, the 83-year-old first-time private eye, is… not good at it. He doesn’t really know how to use his phone, can’t get the recording right, and isn’t exactly discrete. But Sergio quickly dispels the suspicion that anything is amiss, and the documentary instead begins to consider weightier subjects like aging, loneliness, isolation, and grief.
As a public media organization, my award campaign budget at PBS was a fraction of that of, say, a Netflix or an Amazon Studios. However, released during the pandemic, The Mole Agent emerged amidst a growing number of conversations about what it means to age with dignity, and how we can avoid the isolating effects of life’s final act.
We received a lot of positive responses after the documentary aired, so come time for award season, I reached back out to all the people who reached out to us about the film. A lot of what we heard was that the film made them think more deeply about their own relationship to their grandparents, or how the film made them feel understood as a senior citizen who was being politely, albeit strongly, shuffled away from society. So I emailed all of them and had them record, guerillla film-style, testimonials about how the film resonated with them. This involved a lot of me, sitting patiently on a Zoom call, teaching 80-year-olds how to flip their camera around. But the result was a patchwork of people at all different stages of their life speaking directly to the Oscar voters about how the film made them feel something new.
Our veteran press advisor said it was “the best campaign he’d ever seen” and The Mole Agent became the first Chilean film to ever receive a nomination for Best Documentary. It also got adapted into a series starring Ted Danson.
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© Andy Reischling, 2026