A young woman named Julieta stumbles one night of 2014 into an emergency room in Tucumán with excruciating abdominal pain. The camera follows her closely as a nurse and a violent night-shift doctor dismiss her problems, a nightmarish sequence shot that ends with Julieta handcuffed to the operating table and facing a small cardboard box with a dead fetus in it.

‘This was your child,’ a policewoman scolds her. Terrified and sobbing, Julieta denies she was ever pregnant, and only manages to beg the police and call for her mom. 

The harrowing opening scene of Belén is a raw depiction of obstetric violence and police abuse. It is also a clear step-up in Dolores Fonzi’s directorial skills in her second film, a solid retelling of a real-life case that became a landmark for the Argentine women’s movement.  The film is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

The real Belén — whose real name remains unknown — was sentenced to prison for first-degree murder after suffering from a miscarriage she wasn’t even aware she was having. Her case sparked a feminist tidal wave that would eventually lead to the passing of a bill to legalize abortion in late 2020. 

As in her first film Blondie, Fonzi also plays the lead role: Soledad Deza, a catholic family lawyer who casually — and literally — comes across Julieta’s case two years later. She learns that Julieta (Camila Pláate) was charged with homicide and has been held in pre-trial detention for almost two years, the maximum allowed. When she is found guilty and sentenced by an all-male, pro-life court, Soledad will snatch the case from an unwilling public defender, played by a dexterous Julieta Cardinali. 

“I would love not to have to take care of all the women you systematically abandon,” Soledad says to Cardinali’s character, an established attorney who appears to want Julieta in prison herself. It’s one of the few grave lines in a script — based on journalist Ana Correa’s book Somos Belén — that flows steadily through a fight-the-power template, and manages to include timely touches of witty comedy, as a team of women grows into an organization that takes on the patriarchy in the very conservative small community of Tucumán. Once again, Fonzi co-wrote the script with actor and playwright Laura Paredes, who plays her sparky legal sidekick with the dynamics of a buddy-film duo. 

A judicial drama first, the story follows Soledad’s attempts to get the original trial annulled,  but comes to a turning point when she is systematically denied the case file by an eerie judge, played with charming malice by Luis Machín. The only way forward is to turn the case into a cause, and as Soledad and her team start to draw the attention of the media and galvanize nationwide support (as well as local resistance) the film itself shifts from a courtroom story to a depiction of what would become a slow-burning but revolutionary social movement.

Fonzi’s decision is effective, as the film builds up momentum and emotionality, but it’s also a double-edged sword. While the campaign grows to become both a protagonist and a theme, Belén’s character is somewhat weighed down. While Soledad’s struggles to balance the case and her family role are described in detail, there’s little on Belen’s background, the character who reeled us into the film. 

Argentina’s recent political and cultural history has certainly become a quarry for streaming platforms lately. While this trend has mined out popular audiovisual products, it also has resulted in a very uneven roster of films and series. In most cases, the production designs (costumes, art, settings) successfully conveyed a fine-tuned realism, which often outperforms rather artificial, trimmed dialogues that sound overly designed for global audiences.

Luckily, in the hands of Fonzi and Paredes (who also co-wrote Laura Citarella’s festivals hit Trenque Lauquen) Belén comes out mostly unscathed, thanks to a skillful handling of the genre. The late folk singer Mercedes Sosa — a Tucumán-born Latin American icon who was a persecuted communist activist — joins the cast of well-performing local actors as both a visual reference and a great choice for the end song. 

Produced by K&S Films, Belén joins a family of well-crafted Argentine political films that range from Israel Adrian Cateano’s Chronicle of an Escape to Santiago Mitre’s Oscar-nominated Argentina, 1985.  Films that combine an ideological stance and classical storytelling with a sincere aim for mass-appeal. With its landing in a context hostile to women’s rights, Belén appears to have arrived just in time.