Belén, When the Law Disciplines the Body

Dolores Fonzi’s film interrogates the institutional violence exercised in the name of the law. 

Belén (2025), the opening film of the 46th Havana International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, and recipient of a Coral Award for Leandro de Loredo’s sound work, draws on Somos Belén, the book by Ana Correa, to examine how institutional violence is legitimized in the name of the law and how, in the face of that machinery, collective action can open cracks where the system seeks to close off any possibility of reform.

In March 2014, a woman was admitted to Avellaneda Hospital in the city of San Miguel de Tucumán with severe abdominal pain. She did not know she was pregnant. She suffered a spontaneous miscarriage in a bathroom and, while she remained unconscious, was reported by medical staff. The report led to her arrest, more than two years in pretrial detention, and an eight-year sentence under the charge of “abortion followed by alleged homicide.” In 2017, thanks to the intervention of attorney Soledad Deza, the ruling was reviewed and the young woman was acquitted.

Dolores Fonzi, an actress who made her directorial debut with Blondi (2023), takes this real case and shifts it into fiction through the framework of a courtroom thriller. In doing so, the film does not merely reconstruct a case file; rather, it examines the mechanisms through which a conservative apparatus exerts control over the body of a woman in a situation of vulnerability and, conversely, stages feminist collective action as a force capable of intervening, contesting meaning, and overturning a case the system considered closed.

In her debut performance, Camila Plaate, awarded the Silver Shell at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, portrays Belén—a fictional name that preserves the real protagonist’s identity—with a restrained approach. Silences, sustained gazes, and measured breathing construct a register in which the body functions as a site of political inscription beyond words. Within that minimal terrain, both exposure to institutional violence and a form of resistance that does not require articulation become visible.

Dolores Fonzi embodies Soledad Deza, the Catholic and feminist lawyer who takes on the defense and activates the film’s narrative axis. Through her intervention, the story approaches the confrontation with the judicial system not as an individual feat, but as the outcome of a militant, legal, and political network that lays bare the fissures within the process.

The screenplay, written by Fonzi alongside Laura Paredes, draws on the mechanisms of the courtroom thriller to transform hearings, interrogations, and expert reports into arenas of ideological dispute. While the film acknowledges the collective support behind the case, it chooses to articulate its development through Deza’s trajectory, concentrating in her figure the tension between a patriarchal order and the possibility of intervening within its internal logic.

Visually, Belén places the intimate and the institutional in constant tension. Hospital corridors, the prison, defense offices, the courtroom, and even the street are configured as spaces in permanent contrast, where bureaucracy intrudes upon the domestic and subjects it to its logic. Close-ups insist on the female body as a territory of political dispute, while the alternation between the private—the scenes of family life—and the public dismantles any stable separation between the two registers: everyday life emerges as a space traversed by power, and a woman’s body, even in silence, is exposed as a text the system seeks to read, classify, and discipline.

In a certain sense, Belén enters into dialogue with Argentina, 1985 (2022), both formally—by situating itself within a judicial narrative that turns legal procedure into narrative material—and through its political positioning. In both cases, cinema assumes itself as an exercise in active memory and warning: not to reconstruct a closed past, but to challenge the present and point out that every regression responds to an ongoing dispute. Within this framework, freedom does not appear as a definitive conquest, but as an always unstable territory that must be defended, reviewed, and put back into play again and again.

By Juan Pablo Russo
Edited by José Teodoro 
Copyright FIPRESCI