“Decidió hacer pública su historia para que el pasado no se repita,” the text explains at the conclusion of Dolores María Fonzi’s Belén; or, translated, “She chose to share her story to prevent the past from repeating itself.”
That’s an especially pointed statement in a film about women’s bodily autonomy. The movie’s a dramatization of a 2014 incident in which a woman was arrested and jailed for a miscarriage; the case eventually led to abortion’s legalization in Argentina in 2020. It’s impossible to watch it now, without being aware that only two years after that, many US states recriminalized reproductive rights. Now Argentinian women have freedoms that many here don’t. The film is, for American watchers, a story of triumph, and a reminder that human dignity and freedom can be lost as well as won.
Belén (Camila Pláate), a pseudonym, went to a public hospital in Tucumán province with severe abdominal pain. The doctors and nurses are largely indifferent to her agony until they realize that she’s pregnant; she has a miscarriage in the toilet. Soon thereafter, while she’s on the operating table, police show up with a fetus in a bucket that they claim she killed. The charge makes no sense—she wasn’t visibly pregnant, and the fetus can’t possibly be hers. But she’s handcuffed, thrown into jail for two years awaiting trial, and finally given an incompetent defense.
After Belén is sentenced to eight years in prison, her appeal’s picked up by Soledad Deza (Fonzi), a crusading feminist human rights attorney. Deza works to publicize Belén’s case and to get access to her files, which have been locked away by the Catholic sentencing judge.
In its mechanics, the movie’s a straightforward issue film. The opening hospital sequence benefits from the bleary low-budget grit, but the remainder is more workmanlike than atmospheric. Fonzi and Pláate turn in fine but not particularly exceptional performances, and the outcome is never really in doubt.
Nonetheless, the movie packs a bitter punch. The judge’s avuncular, smug hatred of women and indifference to justice leaves you feeling powerless before the patriarchy in a way familiar to any current day Supreme Court watcher. The ugly harassment directed at Belén in prison and at Deza’s family outside of it, all in the name of Christianity, echoes the stochastic harassment and violence that has become a commonplace experience for opponents of the regime under MAGA. And scenes of protestors facing rows of ominous police in body armor, bristling with the threat of force, looks like something you’d see on the daily news.
The oppression and cruelty resonates. The resistance, though, feels like a needed tonic. Deza and Belén are able to triumph because they have each other, but also because many other people take up the cause. Deza’s husband stands by her despite her long hours and the attacks on their family home; Belén’s sister insists that she fight back even if it means that she and Belén’s parents may lose their jobs. Other women from around Argentina who’ve been abused in hospitals or targeted for miscarriages or abortions come forward to tell their stories despite the risk to themselves. And people from all over the country flood the streets to protest Belén’s case out of solidarity and because they know that her fight is their fight too.
The tools that Deza uses—the courts, the streets, the press—are one that people are using here, as well. These tactics can feel inadequate and futile in the face of indifference, cruelty, moral panic, and entrenched power. And they can fail; as the rollback of abortion rights here demonstrates, sometimes you go backwards, and sometimes you lose. But Belén is a timely reminder that sometimes you don’t.