Paulina
Directed by Santiago Mitre
Written by Mariano Llinas, Santiago Mitre
Starring Delores Fonzi
Release Date June 23, 2017
Santiago Mitre’s Paulina (2015), starring Dolores Fonzi, is a daring Argentine drama that interrogates politics, justice, and female agency. A challenging, award-winning film that demands critical engagement.
An Arthouse Drama with Political Urgency
Argentine director Santiago Mitre has built a reputation for politically charged cinema, and Paulina (La Patota) may be his boldest work. Premiering at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize, the film interrogates justice, violence, and autonomy through a story that refuses easy answers.
At its center is Dolores Fonzi, delivering a remarkable performance defined by restraint. Her inscrutable expressions and measured delivery create a protagonist who resists audience empathy in conventional terms, instead inviting viewers to wrestle with her choices on their own terms. She is at once frustrating, courageous, and enigmatic—a figure who embodies the contradictions of both personal and political identity.
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A Radical Narrative Structure
The film opens with one of its most impressive sequences: a ten-minute, unbroken take in which Paulina informs her father (Oscar Martínez) of her decision to abandon a promising legal career for a teaching post in a remote province. The scene’s theatricality recalls the intensity of stage drama, while the dialogue grounds us in the political and ideological tensions of contemporary Argentina.
Initially, the narrative seems to be about Paulina’s attempts to bring political education to disengaged rural students. Her lessons fail, her students resist, and the film positions her as an outsider both culturally and socially. Mitre emphasizes this dislocation by leaving the students’ dialogue unsubtitled for non-Spanish-speaking viewers, effectively aligning the audience with Paulina’s alienation.
But the film radically shifts when Paulina is raped by a gang of young men. Mitre films the assault with a matter-of-fact gaze—eschewing sensationalism or melodrama—in a style reminiscent of cinéma vérité. Just as the audience begins to process this rupture, the film fractures again, rewinding to recount events from the perspective of one of the attackers (Cristian Salguero). This structural gamble destabilizes the spectator, placing the crime within a wider social, political, and gendered context.
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Female Agency and Controversial Choices
The aftermath of the assault makes Paulina one of the most divisive Argentine films of the last decade. Instead of following a conventional trajectory of trauma and recovery, Paulina makes choices that are at once courageous, perplexing, and unsettling.
Mitre and Fonzi refuse to present her as a symbol of victimhood. Instead, she asserts a radical form of agency—one that will undoubtedly divide audiences and provoke debate. In doing so, the film interrogates how society, politics, and law frame women’s bodies and decisions. Paulinarefuses catharsis, offering instead the uncomfortable recognition that justice, morality, and healing do not conform to neat narratives.
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Placing Paulina in Mitre’s Career and Argentine Cinema
Seen within Mitre’s larger body of work, Paulina represents a continuation of his interest in the intersection of politics and individual lives. His earlier feature, The Student (2011), explored corruption and ambition within the Argentine university system. His later international success, Argentina, 1985 (2022), dramatized the historic trial of the country’s military juntas. Paulina sits between these works, smaller in scale but equally rigorous in its political engagement.
It also resonates with a tradition of Argentine cinema that uses intimate stories to explore systemic violence and moral ambiguity. Like Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (2008), Mitre’s film refuses clear resolutions, compelling the viewer to confront uncertainty and complicity.
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Why Paulina Demands Attention
Paulina is not an easy film. It is exhausting, intellectually demanding, and deliberately alienating. Yet it is precisely in this difficulty that the film derives its power. Like much of Latin American political cinema, it compels audiences to question the systems of power that shape individual lives.
For scholars of international cinema, Paulina is essential viewing: a film that destabilizes narrative conventions, foregrounds political context, and insists on the complexity of female subjectivity. For general audiences, it may feel austere or even frustrating, but for those willing to engage, it is among the most provocative works of 21st-century Argentine film.
If you can find this film, see it. Paulina is not designed to comfort—it is designed to provoke, to disturb, and to linger long after the credits roll.
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