In a truly superb performance, Dolores Fonzi plays Paulina, the daughter of a well-to-do judge who (despite the protestations of the men closest to her) makes the decision to abandon her Ph.D. and promising law career in order to teach politics in a pioneering education program in the rural slums. The job takes her to the border joining Argentina to Paraguay and Brazil, a marginalized area whose forests have been violated by the lumber industry.
One night, still struggling to overcome the indifference of her students toward lessons on the principals of democracy, Paulina is mistaken as the cheating girlfriend of a local man, and brutally attacked. In the aftermath, Paulina again defies the pleas of her father and boyfriend, and rather than return home, she endeavours to confront the guilty parties.
Santiago Mitre’s contemporary remake of the 1960 Argentinean classic eschews straightforward answers in favour of questioning observation in an affecting consideration of how one woman weighs the experience of assult against her social convictions.