This extraordinary docudrama begins back in 2006 with Vicenta, a domestic worker, living with her daughter Laura hers in a very humble house in the Guernica neighborhood (Buenos Aires province). The problem is that Laura, who is 19 years old and has a severe maturational delay ("it grows but does not grow," the off-screen story tells us) is pregnant for a few weeks as a result of rape by her uncle. Assisted by the law established in the Penal Code for a century for these cases, Vicenta requests that her daughter have an abortion at the San Martín Hospital, but she will find a desperate and inhuman series of pilgrimages, procedures and obstacles to carry out the intervention brought by fearful doctors and a prodigal inhuman judicial system, at all levels, of prosecutors and anti-rights judges.
The approach by Darío Doria (director and co-screenwriter) of Vicenta and her daughter's odyssey is extremely original: the two of them and the other actors in this story are represented by dolls made with plasticine located in settings carefully designed to scale by the director of art Mariana Ardanaz. But it is not a stop motion animated film: the characters are in fixed positions and what is moving is the camera or supposedly the stage. They do not speak either: a permanent and essential voice-over (by Liliana Herrero) recounts the events in a second person permanently addressed to Vicenta, in a permanent interpellation (to her but also to us) that is poetic, eloquent and touching.
Newsreel images of the time are added, integrated into the scenography (since the case was acquiring great media notoriety) and the script does not save us from reading the outrageous anti-rights rulings that are hindering the voluntary termination of Laura's pregnancy.
Vicenta is an essential documentary, one of the great Argentine films of 2020 that describes an epic of resistance in the face of the miseries entrenched in the judicial and medical powers and a plea about the inalienable right of women to dispose of their bodies to avoid so much pain and abuse.
