Dolores Fonzi, Argentine actress and director: “We have to hope that this nightmare of clowns will end soon” | Culture

On the horizon of the actress Dolores Fonzi (Buenos Aires, 45 years old) the address was not included. At least, until recently. Star of his generation, immensely popular face thanks to Burnt Silver, The Aura, Paulina, The Mountain Range, Truman or his television work, his first approach to writing, with the series I’m your fan, left a bitter aftertaste. With Blondi, which premieres today, Friday, in Spain, began writing the story with Laura Paredes (Trenque Lauquen), thinking of starring in it, and after the pandemic he decided to also direct it. He could have stopped there. But Javier Milei won the Argentine presidential elections and Fonzi has undertaken a campaign against the far right with the best weapon he masters: cinema. And that is why he will get behind the cameras again to shoot his second feature film, We are Bethlehem, about one of the most distressing and media-covered cases in Argentina: the one that led to the imprisonment of a woman who had suffered a spontaneous abortion in 2014.

Blondi, the protagonist, became a mother at 15. She tried to have an illegal abortion and it went wrong, and now she has a deep friendship with her son, Mirko. She is a cool mother, a lover of disco The Velvet Underground & Nico, who smokes his own herbs and is now suffering because Mirko is becoming independent. Fonzi is as much a hurricane as his character: “The film is born from an image in a novel of a mother and son alone in the world. Blondi It is a militant film. Because it talks about women, about single mothers, who mother alone, without fathers present. We show new ways of being a mother, not that perfect motherhood pressured by the system, but a new one that comes to bring relief to mothers. There are many things about being a mother from other generations that are becoming obsolete. It is much better today to build a closeness with your children, to have them tell you things, rather than being the authority in the house. Blondi is good one day, bad the next. She doesn’t hide it. Something that we should all teach, because that way those children are better prepared for frustration.”

Fonzi defends a cocktail of social, feminist and political activism. “The moment requires it. Because for me everything is very bad. The world is a disaster. Being a militant in the street is very good. Being a seasoned militant, exposing one’s body in the street, seems necessary to me. And my way of putting my body on the line is by making films.” And for this reason, his second film will be “even more of a struggle than “Blondi”.

The filmmaker does not hide her disagreement with Milei. “You recently came to Spain to collect a medal, right?” True, from the hands of the president of the Community of Madrid. “In other words, we all live in the same bag of cats.” And she bursts out laughing. About some of the speeches of her president, she reflects: “I am fed up with this message, which I have already experienced in various stages of Argentina, that because of cinema there are poor children.” How do you fight against this demagogy? “We must resist and have the hope that this nightmare of clowns will end soon. This circus… functional to the system, functional to the rich, to those who have the most. And it is against the people and those who have the least. It was known before, you understand? The vote was made out of desperation. It is not to blame anyone, but what happened happened, what was known was going to happen… It is terrible.”

Is desperation on the rise in Argentina? “Not in my case. Wait, I’m nobody. If I’m consumed by desperation, what’s left for people who have nothing? Look, desperation brought us here, as (the writer) Mariana Enriquez said. And that’s what made Milei win. Indignation? Yes, although it’s useless. We have to try to analyze these cycles so that they don’t happen again… But they always happen again. It’s something cyclical, a self-boycott. And I, from my privilege as a person who lacks nothing, just want to say that next year there won’t be any Argentine films anywhere. If at these last Platino Awards we were the largest group, next year there won’t be anything, except for some from the completely private sector. Luckily, one will be my next one,” since We are Bethlehem It will be produced by Prime Video. At that moment, she points silently and smiling at the poster for her film. “We will resist, waiting for this cycle to end and in the meantime we will do – I mean films – whatever we can do. We will continue to campaign, continue to raise awareness, continue to gather people to mobilize the rest.”

We are Bethlehem It illustrates one of the most significant and outrageous cases that led to the illegalisation of abortion in Argentina. In the early hours of 21 March 2014, in Tucumán, Belén, a 33-year-old woman, went into the emergency room of a hospital with severe abdominal pain. She did not know she was pregnant and suffered a spontaneous abortion there. When she woke up, she was surrounded by police: the medical staff that morning – who were not the ones who had treated her – had reported her. She ended up in prison, tried and sentenced to eight years in prison for “double aggravated homicide due to the relationship and treachery”. Only the battle of her second lawyer, Soledad Deza (who will be played by Fonzi), managed to reverse the situation and the Supreme Court of Justice of Tucumán acquitted Belén in 2017. This was one of the testimonies shown in the documentary. Let it be law, by Juan Solanas, which caused an earthquake of sisterhood at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, and the case that prompted the then president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, to pass the law that decriminalized abortion in his country. “You see how it is necessary to make militant cinema,” insists Fonzi.

Why didn’t you continue writing in 2010, after the premiere of the series? I’m your fan? “Now I really write,” she laughs. “Well, well, I’m learning to really write, in this agonizing process that I live, and I always do it with someone else, which helps me. When I do it, I feel like a slave to writing.” And why direct? “Directing is much better than writing, but if you don’t write, you are a victim of what they write to you. Directing is the best. Sorry, acting is the best, and if you direct it is even better.” And weren’t you afraid of having to duplicate yourself in front of and behind the cameras? Fonzi is pleased with his answer: “Not at all. As an actress you have to interpret the universe that they are asking of you and you are an instrument to concretize that idea. So you arrive at the shoot with the idea incorporated. With your own script, you already know what has to happen, it is very fluid. There is no one who comes to tell you what to do. And on top of that, from acting, in this case, you also direct the actors and the other actors can also propose something to you from their work. “It was very pleasant for me.”

_