‘Belén’, an energetic courtroom drama about the case that promoted the ‘green wave’ of Argentine women | Cinema: previews and reviews

Nativity scene It opens with a sequence of genuine terror in which an emaciated young woman, torn by grief, is seen entering the hospital helped by her mother. What happens to her in that hospital in the Argentine province of Tucumán is difficult to digest: a miscarriage ends with the young woman’s arrest and accusation of murder.

The obstetric truculence remains there (even if its horror resonates throughout the film) to give way to an energetic and effective judicial drama led by the lawyer and the journalist who investigated and defended the cause of this young woman condemned by judges and society. Belén, the fictitious name of the twenty-four year old from Tucumán, ended up becoming a symbol of the fight for women’s reproductive rights in Argentina and her case was one of the triggers of the feminist movement for legal and safe abortion known as The Green Wave.

Actress Dolores Fonzi’s second film is not as intimate and special as her debut, blonde, but he manages to skillfully move between the conventions of the judicial genre until he captures the viewer with his conviction. Belén is an activist film that does not hide its condition in a social and political present that threatens women’s rights in Argentina and, unfortunately, in much of the planet. The anti-abortion involution is not a fiction and the film does not hide its agenda nor its function.

As in blonde, The humor is there, but the serious tone of an extreme case like that of Belén weighs more, a case that also focuses on the violence that begins in hospitals. Narrated from the point of view of Soledad Deza, the lawyer played by Fonzi – a lawyer specializing in women’s cases who sees an unbearable injustice in Belén’s story – the film traces the real events and their manipulation, the investigations, the lawyer’s family life and the social mobilization that the case provoked.

The work of actress Camila Plaate, in the role of the condemned woman, was awarded at the last San Sebastián festival. Plaate internalizes with nervousness, perplexity and impotence the ordeal of a woman who remained hidden in anonymity. The journalist played by Laura Paredes completes the investigative (and creative) tandem. Fonzi and Paredes, actresses and screenwriters, once again demonstrate the fruits of their collaborative work. Nativity scenechosen to represent Argentina at the next Oscars, he distills a contagious epic that claims, with the background voice of the greatest “singer”, Mercedes Sosa of Tucumán, a land of “struggle and resistance”.