Dolores Fonzi Made Belén Her Argument, Then Cast Herself as Its Lawyer

Dolores Fonzi

Photo: Pedro J Pacheco / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 19, 1978 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Occupation	Actress and film director
Known for	Truman, The Aura, Black Snow
Awards	Premio Platino · Silver Condor · Premio Sur · Goya · Premio Sur (shared) · Konex Award, Diploma of Merit

Belén opens on a single, almost unbroken take. A young woman doubled over with abdominal pain walks into a public hospital in Tucumán, and before the night is out the police have handcuffed her and written the word homicide into her file. Dolores Fonzi wrote that shot and directed it, then stepped into the film as somebody else: Soledad Deza, the lawyer who took up her defence. Argentine cinema had spent a quarter of a century using Fonzi’s face to carry other people’s arguments. With Belén the argument became hers, and she still chose to stand beside the story rather than inside it.

The first audience to learn her name knew her as a villain. Dolores María Fonzi was born in Buenos Aires and grew up in Adrogué, south of the capital, where her mother moved the children after her parents separated. She trained at Carlos Gandolfo’s acting school, and the producer Cris Morena cast her as the scheming Clara Vázquez in the youth series Verano del ’98, opposite her younger brother Tomás Fonzi. The part made her a teen-television name. She walked away from it at the end of the decade to play a sex worker in Marcelo Piñeyro’s heist thriller Burnt Money (Plata quemada), her first film.

That exit set the terms for the next decade. Fonzi chose auteur films over prime-time leads. Fito Páez‘s Private Lives (Vidas privadas) took her to San Sebastián, the first festival of her life; with Luis Ortega she built the low-budget Caja negra from the ground up, as actor and co-creator. In Fabián Bielinsky’s The Aura (El aura), the last feature from the director of Nine Queens, she held the screen opposite Ricardo Darín. Television kept calling, and she answered on her own terms, starring in and producing the miniseries Soy tu fan, a romantic comedy later remade in Mexico.

The performance that changed how the industry read her came from Santiago Mitre. In Paulina (La patota), his remake of a 1960 melodrama that had starred Mirtha Legrand, Fonzi plays a lawyer who leaves a promising career in Buenos Aires to teach in a poor district of Misiones, is raped by a gang of local young men, and then refuses to behave the way everyone around her expects. The film won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes. Fonzi won Best Actress at the Platino Awards, the Silver Condor and the Argentine Academy’s Sur Awards for it.

Mitre became her partner after that shoot, and he cast her again as the daughter of Ricardo Darín’s cornered head of state in The Summit (La cordillera). She also became a dependable presence in Spanish-language cinema, from Cesc Gay’s Truman to Claudia Llosa’s Netflix adaptation Fever Dream (Distancia de rescate). Later came Valerio Mastandrea’s Italian drama Nonostante, which opened Venice’s Orizzonti competition. What she was not doing, on screen at least, was deciding what a film was about.

Blondi changed that. Written with the actor Laura Paredes and produced by Mitre’s company La Unión de los Ríos, it is a loose, warm comedy about a single mother who lives with her twenty-year-old son more like a sister than a parent. Fonzi directed it and played the title role. It premiered at the Buenos Aires independent festival BAFICI in April 2023 before screening in San Sebastián. Fonzi has pointed out what ties it to her next film: both are about motherhood and everything that surrounds it.

That next film was bigger, riskier, and not originally hers to direct. The case behind Belén, a young woman jailed for more than two years in Tucumán on a charge of aggravated homicide after a miscarriage in a public hospital, had rallied Argentina’s feminist movement and become Ana Correa’s book Somos Belén. Fonzi had spoken up for the woman at an awards ceremony years before. When the producer Leticia Cristi of K&S Films bought the rights, Fonzi was attached only as an actor. After Blondi, Cristi offered her the whole film: the script, the direction, the lead. She wrote it with Paredes while shooting a series in Chile, cast two real-life sisters, Camila and Ruth Plaate, as Belén and her sister, and shot part of it in Tucumán with Amazon MGM Studios behind the production.

It premiered in competition at San Sebastián in September 2025, decades after her first visit with Páez. As Argentina’s Oscar submission it reached the fifteen-film International Feature shortlist, but not the final five announced in January 2026. Spain was warmer. At the Goya Awards in Barcelona on 28 February 2026, Belén won Best Ibero-American Film, and Fonzi told the room: “We are the films we make.” In June the Argentine Academy’s Sur Awards named it Best Fiction Film and gave Fonzi and Paredes the adapted-screenplay prize. Camila Plaate, in her first film, won San Sebastián’s Silver Shell for supporting performance.

The tidy version of this story, an actress who discovers directing in her forties, gets the chronology wrong, and the press keeps repeating it; even La Nación, reporting the Goya, described Belén as her debut. Fonzi was an author long before Blondi, co-creating Caja negra in her early twenties and producing Soy tu fan a few years later. The sharper question is the one Belén raises about itself. By casting herself as Deza, Fonzi built a film about a silenced young woman around the lawyer who speaks for her. It is a clear, award-friendly courtroom shape, praised by critics for its restraint, and it keeps Belén at a careful distance. Fonzi has said she did not want to underline anything, so that the facts, not the film, would give the opinion. The structure gives one anyway: about who gets to carry a story to the public.

She has not stopped acting. In The House of the Spirits, Prime Video‘s Spanish-language series from Isabel Allende’s novel, which premiered on 29 April 2026, she plays the adult Clara del Valle, the clairvoyant at the centre of the Trueba saga, opposite Alfonso Herrera’s Esteban Trueba. In September, Pablo Larraín‘s My Sad Dead (Mis muertos tristes), a four-episode Netflix adaptation of stories by Mariana Enriquez, took a feature-length cut into the San Sebastián competition before reaching the platform on 24 September, with Fonzi in the cast alongside Mercedes Morán.

Fonzi, born on 19 July 1978, has two children, Lázaro and Libertad, from her relationship with Gael García Bernal, whom she met while making Private Lives. She has shared her life with Mitre since 2015.

No third feature as director has been announced. The precedent is already set, though. Whatever Fonzi films next will be read, before anyone has seen it, for what it argues and for where she places herself in the frame.