when a film is produced on a shoestring budget by a couple of hardworking filmmakers and when it tells the story of a genuine tragedy , the easy path for a reviewer who hated the movie is to give it a pass . toss out your usual objectivity , ignore how many times you checked your watch while viewing it , forget how unbearable it was to sit through , and find some meaningless way to compliment it . this , of course , will be of no service to your readers , but at least you'll avoid the hate mail from the movie's fans . thus it is with a heavy heart that i review the movie paulina ( not to be confused with the recent movie paulie about a talking parrot ) . directed by vicky funari as a labor of intense love - she spent the last one third of her life on film - the movie blends documentary footage with historic and fanciful recreations to relate the bitterly sad and true story of paulina cruz suarez . paulina was a maid in vicky's household when vicky was young . i got to learn the film's background when i attended a screening in which the two women who made it were present . for those without such context , the reaction to the film may be that it is a parody of a bad indie film . the acting is amateurish , the story is maudlin , and it has all the visual appeal of a bad home movie . grainy and overexposed , the movie , shot on 16mm film and videotape , has little to recommend it . confusingly composed , the movie jumps about jarringly as it tells its story . quite bloody at times , the story , full of horrific images , seems designed to shock and repulse us . why else would you include a scene with a completely nude and bloody 8-year-old paulina ? another scene has a teenage paulina being fondled on a bus by the man sitting next to her . in retaliation , she bites off part of his finger . this covers the both of them in a bucket of blood . the passengers on the bus then view the girl in their minds as everything from saint to sinner . one , for example , sees her as an aztec priestess holding out a large heart that she had just cut from a body . the lugubrious tale has paulina being raped and beaten . certainly she had to endure a miserable life . but that does not guarantee that a movie about her will necessarily being good . i felt trapped in the theater watching it . only the opportunity to talk with the filmmakers afterwards made the movie bearable . paulina runs 1 : 28 . the film is in spanish with english subtitles . it is not rated but would be an r for violence and nudity and would be acceptable for older teenagers . 
