A 1-hour, 36-minute crime story on Netflix is currently trending globally, and it’s mainly because the entire plot is based on a bizarre real-life 2009 incident. A woman from Mexico named Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza had a miscarriage. Then another, followed by a third one, which led her to become extremely vulnerable to outside pressure — so much so that the lady went on to fake a completed pregnancy despite having a miscarriage four months in.
But that’s not the worst part. Mendoza, who worked at a hospital, said she had a deal with another woman to take her child instead. And on the day this child was born, she went to the hospital, placed her baby in a gift bag, and took it. This wild true story has immediately translated into one of Netflix’s strongest international debuts of the week. The film only arrived on August 13, and in TUDUM’s Top 10 Non-English movies between August 10 and August 16, the film currently sits at the #2 spot with 5.1 million views and 8.2 million hours of watch time. The only non-English title above it is the Brazilian crime sequel Nando Between Two Worlds – A Sintonia Film, which ranks higher with 11.1 million views.
The film is titled A Child of My Own, and it follows the complete story of Mendoza and all its nuances. The baby’s mother, Mayra Aurora Navarro Vega, denied ever agreeing to give up her daughter, while hospital records, paperwork found with Mendoza, and surveillance footage supported her account. Mendoza’s husband, Arturo Calderón Gamiño, who had no knowledge of the incident, spent over two years in jail for the events, but was ultimately acquitted having become involved only after the fact. In the film A Child of My Own, Luisa Guzmán plays Vega, Armando Espitia plays Gamiño, and Ana Celeste plays Mendoza.
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Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
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🔬House
🩺Scrubs
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01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
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02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
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03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
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04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
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05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
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06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
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07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
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08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
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Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
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Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
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You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
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You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
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You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
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You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
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You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
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What Else Is Trending on Netflix’s Non-English Movies Chart?
A Child of My Own immediately outranked Elize: Shadows of a Woman, which was already in its fourth week in the Top 10, but now sits in the third spot. Bollywood film Cocktail 2, which stars Shahid Kapoor and Kriti Sanon, sits at number four, with the heart-wrenching tear-jerker Pakistan-India partition story Main Vaapas Aaunga by Imtiaz Ali (Rockstar) at number five. The sixth spot belongs to My Best Friend, His Girlfriend and Me; Daddy’s in Trouble is sitting at number seven; and fellow four-week holdover, The Debt Collector, is at number eight. At number nine, there’s Idhayam Murali, with a steamy romance titled Desire rounding out the Top 10 with 1.5 million views.
A Child of My Own is based on a true story, and is available to stream on Netflix. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
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