‘Belen’ review: Director/star Dolores Fonzi turns real-life Argentinian case into powerful feminist drama

Dir: Dolorez Fonzi. Argentina. 2025. 107mins

In March 2014, a younger lady attended a hospital in San Miguel de Tucuman in northern Argentina, complaining of belly ache; unbeknownst to her, she was pregnant and struggling a miscarriage. Only a few hours later, after police discovered a foetus in a hospital lavatory, she was arrested for intentional infanticide (abortion being unlawful within the nation on the time) and finally sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. This stunning real-life occasion is dramatised in Belen, the impassioned and highly effective second movie from director/star Dolores Fonzi, which attracts on each the extraordinary private ache of this case and the neighborhood outrage and activism it impressed.

Demonstrates restraint and sensitivity in each course and efficiency

Chosen as Argentina’s official Oscar submission, Belen opened within the nation on September 18 and has since performed a number of festivals, together with San Sebastian, the place it received the Silver Seashell for finest supporting efficiency for Camila Plaate. It opens within the UK and US on November 7, earlier than streaming globally on Amazon Prime Video on November 14. Sturdy phrase of mouth might assist it discover a responsive viewers. It feels significantly resonant at a time when the problems of abortion and ladies’s rights are once more within the authorized highlight worldwide.

The presence of Fonzi each behind and in entrance of the digicam can also be a serious promoting level, as she demonstrates restraint and sensitivity in each course and efficiency. Fonzi has a long-standing reference to the Belen case; whereas accepting a finest actress award on the 2016 Palatino Awards for her efficiency in Paulina, she held up an indication that learn ‘Freedom For Belen’. She was a part of a quickly rising political motion in Argentina, during which girls had been standing in solidarity with Belen but additionally demanding autonomy over their very own our bodies. Fonzi takes care to depict this incendiary time with authenticity, whereas respecting the truth that this was an intensely troublesome time for Belen and her household. 

‘Belen’ is a pseudonym used to guard the girl’s true id, though her title is used within the movie.

Impressively, Fonzi additionally takes the lead right here (as she did in her 2023 directorial debut Blondi) as real-life legal protection lawyer Soledad Deza, who takes over the case in 2016, after Belen (a uncooked, susceptible Plaate) receives her eight-year jail sentence, having already spent two years behind bars awaiting trial. From the off, Fonzi makes us really feel Soledad’s bone-deep fury on the appalling remedy of her consumer – there isn’t a proof linking Belen to the foetus, the unique defence lawyer did subsequent to no preparation, key information are contradictory, incomplete or withheld – but additionally her skilled understanding of the outdated, patriarchal system during which she is working.

The screenplay by Fonzi and Laura Paredes (who additionally stars as Deza’s fellow lawyer Barbara) is tailored from the guide We Are Belen by Argentinian journalist and lawyer Ana Correa, and largely performs out like a fast-paced authorized procedural. We see Deza and her workforce arising in opposition to challenges, significantly when the rising profile of the case leads to threats and violent behaviour in opposition to Deza’s dwelling and household. But nonetheless Deza works tirelessly to publicise and amplify the case, realizing that constructing grassroots assist is their finest likelihood of securing Belen’s launch.

Other than a harrowing establishing sequence set throughout Belen’s traumatic hospital go to, which makes it clear the playing cards are stacked in opposition to her from the beginning, Fonzi avoids excessive drama or histrionics, letting the troublesome info of this case converse for themselves. Cinematography from Javier Julia and Andres Pepe Estrada’s modifying are frantic within the movie’s disorienting opening scenes, then take a extra measured, conventional method because the case drags on. Music, from, Marilina Bertoldi, is melancholy, woozy at instances, with bursts of optimism because the motion grows.

Whereas the movie makes an unavoidable political assertion – justified, because the Belen case kick-started a motion which ended within the legalisation of abortion in Argentina in 2020 – it by no means turns into a mere polemic. It’s in the end a heartfelt, inspiring story about peculiar individuals who select to face up and make a change – and a reminder that, for therefore many ladies, the combat goes on.