'She believed she needed to be a mother': The shocking case of a fake pregnancy that led to a Mexican baby kidnapping

Remarkable new true-crime docudrama A Child of My Own explores the high-profile case of a young Mexican woman who took desperate measures to fulfil her maternal dream.

On 17 June, 2009, a 26-year-old woman left a Mexico City hospital carrying a gift bag. It contained a newborn baby girl. The woman, Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza, was not her mother.

Warning: This article contains multiple references to miscarriage.

Hours later, she and her husband Arturo were arrested in a motel, and the baby, Katya Valentina, was brought back, unharmed, to her parents. Mendoza was jailed for 13 years for kidnapping, and her case attracted huge media attention in Mexico, as she had faked a full-term pregnancy that had fooled her husband, family, and doctors. The social and mental pressure she felt to be a mother is now explored in a new film, A Child of My Own, which comes to Netflix on Thursday. 

The sensational story isn't told in a standard true crime format, but as a cinematic docudrama. The first half consists of a heavily stylised recreation of Mendoza's version of events, before we then meet the real Mendoza, known as "Ale", in jail, as well others involved in the case, and see news footage from the time.

"I felt like I was living in another dimension. Many times, I wanted to say, 'this isn't real' or 'this isn't happening'. But I couldn't," Mendoza tells the film's director, Maite Alberdi.

She's commenting on a scene that recreates her baby shower from 2009, with Mexican actor Ana Celeste Montalvo playing her. The heavily "pregnant" Mendoza is being celebrated by friends and family with cake, gifts and balloons. It was a situation that Mendoza admits left her conflicted. On the one hand, she says: "I felt so special." On the other, she adds: "I wanted someone to burst that balloon of lies."

Chilean director Alberdi, a double Oscar nominee in the best documentary category, tells Mendoza's version of events as a dramatised fairy tale, beginning with Mendoza and Arturo's wedding in 2000. The colours are baby hues of pastel pinks, yellows and blues. The camera moves in soft focus. The maternity clinic waiting room is overlooked by a joyful mother-and-baby photo. Mendoza is always dressed in shades of pink and this part of the story is told from her perspective, using her voiceover.   

"I've made [these scenes] look like a fairy tale because it's Mendoza's dream of what she wanted the experience to be, or it's the way she's telling the story to herself," Alberdi tells the BBC. "It's her subjective perspective of reality. We take this pink world to an extreme, partly because her world also is in real life, very pink. As you'll discover in the film, she loves the colour. It's made to be very representative of her dream of the marriage and the baby."

What's clear is that from a young age, the desire to be a mother was a pressure that weighed deeply on Mendoza. She married when she was 17 years old and already pregnant, but she miscarried the baby, and the next. She kept her third miscarriage a secret, fearing her husband's and her in-law family's reaction. She claimed to police she then met a pregnant woman, Mayra, in the maternity clinic, who didn't want her own........

© BBC