‘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 young woman attended a hospital in San Miguel de Tucuman in northern Argentina, complaining of abdominal pain; unbeknownst to her, she was pregnant and suffering a miscarriage. Just a few hours later, after police found a foetus in a hospital bathroom, she was arrested for intentional infanticide (abortion being illegal in the country at the time) and eventually sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. This shocking real-life event is dramatised in Belen, the impassioned and powerful second film from director/star Dolores Fonzi, which draws on both the intense personal pain of this case and the community outrage and activism it inspired.

Demonstrates restraint and sensitivity in both direction and performance

Selected as Argentina’s official Oscar submission, Belen opened in the country on September 18 and has since played multiple festivals, including San Sebastian, where it won the Silver Seashell for best supporting performance for Camila Plaate. It opens in the UK and US on November 7, before streaming globally on Amazon Prime Video on November 14. Strong word of mouth could help it find a responsive audience. It feels particularly resonant at a time when the issues of abortion and women’s rights are again in the legal spotlight worldwide.

The presence of Fonzi both behind and in front of the camera is also a major selling point, as she demonstrates restraint and sensitivity in both direction and performance. Fonzi has a long-standing connection with the Belen case; while accepting a best actress award at the 2016 Palatino Awards for her performance in Paulina, she held up a sign that read ‘Freedom For Belen’. She was part of a rapidly growing political movement in Argentina, in which women were standing in solidarity with Belen but also demanding autonomy over their own bodies. Fonzi takes care to depict this incendiary time with authenticity, while respecting the fact that this was an intensely difficult time for Belen and her family. 

‘Belen’ is a pseudonym used to protect the woman’s true identity, although her name is used in the film.

Impressively, Fonzi also takes the lead here (as she did in her 2023 directorial debut Blondi) as real-life criminal defense lawyer Soledad Deza, who takes over the case in 2016, after Belen (a raw, vulnerable Plaate) receives her eight-year prison sentence, having already spent two years behind bars awaiting trial. From the off, Fonzi makes us feel Soledad’s bone-deep fury at the appalling treatment of her client – there is no evidence linking Belen to the foetus, the original defence lawyer did next to no preparation, key files are contradictory, incomplete or withheld – but also her professional understanding of the outdated, patriarchal system in which she is operating.

The screenplay by Fonzi and Laura Paredes (who also stars as Deza’s fellow lawyer Barbara) is adapted from the book We Are Belen by Argentinian journalist and lawyer Ana Correa, and mostly plays out like a fast-paced legal procedural. We see Deza and her team coming up against challenges, particularly when the growing profile of the case results in threats and violent behaviour against Deza’s home and family. Yet still Deza works tirelessly to publicise and amplify the case, knowing that building grassroots support is their best chance of securing Belen’s release.

Apart from a harrowing establishing sequence set during Belen’s traumatic hospital visit, which makes it clear the cards are stacked against her from the start, Fonzi avoids high drama or histrionics, letting the difficult facts of this case speak for themselves. Cinematography from Javier Julia and Andres Pepe Estrada’s editing are frantic in the film’s disorienting opening scenes, then take a more measured, traditional approach as the case drags on. Music, from, Marilina Bertoldi, is melancholy, woozy at times, with bursts of optimism as the movement grows.

While the film makes an unavoidable political statement – justified, as the Belen case kick-started a movement which ended in the legalisation of abortion in Argentina in 2020 – it never becomes a mere polemic. It is ultimately a heartfelt, inspiring story about ordinary people who choose to stand up and make a change – and a reminder that, for so many women, the fight goes on.