In prison for a miscarriage: the case that changed Argentina's history

Special Envoy to San SebastiánIn 2014, a young woman arrived at a hospital in Tucumán (a conservative province in northern Argentina) with intense abdominal pain and blood loss: she had suffered a miscarriage. Police found a fetus in one of the hospital bathrooms and, without evidence or analysis, charged her with homicide and imprisoned her. Nativity scene, which was presented this Tuesday at the San Sebastian Film Festival, recreates the struggle to free this woman, a victim of a patriarchal society and a corrupt judicial system that agreed to impose an exemplary punishment on her.

The choice of Dolores Fonzi as the lead actress and director of the film is no coincidence: in 2016, the actress went up to collect the Sur Award – the most important in Argentine cinema – for best actress for The gang and held up a sign that read "Freedom for Belén." Fonzi, however, doesn't play the victim but rather Soledad Deza, the lawyer who took on the case after a negligent public defense. Deza, who made a surprise appearance at the festival during the film's press conference, managed to implicate a significant portion of Argentine society in the case, who took to the streets to demand Belén's (the young woman's false name) acquittal. For many, she was one of the catalysts for the social movement that culminated in the 2020 approval of Argentina's first law for voluntary termination of pregnancy.

Argentine cinema, in the midst of a crisis due to the virtual disappearance of public funding for the arts, has found refuge in platforms such as Amazon, the film's producer, which already distributed one of the recent Argentine hits, Argentina, 1985, the film by Santiago Mitre (also producer of Nativity scene) on the trial of the leaders of the military dictatorship. In fact, Nativity scene follows a very similar template (protagonism of a charismatic lawyer, balance between humor and drama) to that ofArgentina, 1985, with whom she also shares the feeling of rage at injustice and the desire to carry out a pertinent exercise of memory, since the current Argentine president, Javier Milei, has said that he wants to repeal the abortion law.

In any case, Nativity scene It is political cinema with a great capacity to connect emotionally with the audience, who in San Sebastian laughed, cried and applauded the film. It must be said that Fonzi, who had already made his debut behind the camera in Blondi (2023), is a more limited narrator than Mitre, and her style is merely functional. And Yeah Sundays It represented an uncomfortable and ambiguous social cinema, Nativity scene It exemplifies the opposite, using all the dramatic tools to serve its thesis, which is none other than to denounce the helplessness of women in a society that disrespects their reproductive rights. Of course, it might have made more sense to screen it out of competition, because the most important thing about this film isn't its cinematic value.