Taormina Film Festival 2025, Review: Axel Monsù's "For Your Sake"

The Difficulty of Being a Woman

The 71st edition of the Taormina Film Festival has been declared as dedicated to women, to equal rights, to the achievements women have made, and to those they aspire to reach. Therefore, no better film could have been screened than "For Your Sake," directed by Axel Monsù, in competition at the 71st edition of Taormina.

Set in a rural community in Argentina organized around agriculture and shepherding, "For Your Sake" (original title "Por tu bien") tells a true story of subjugation, conditioning, and submission to a faith overridden by instincts and used to justify patriarchal extremism.

Zulma (Sabrina Melgarejo) is a young woman deprived of education, removed from school by her own parents to become a wife and mother, stripped of her friendships and aspirations to conform to the roots of a society organized according to patriarchal rules. A community that sees in faith the justification for every behavior, conditioned by indulgence, where women are subjugated to servitude.

The direction of Axel Monsù succeeds in demonstrating the complexity of human relationships and the difficulty of breaking free from conditioning, accomplishing this through the protagonist's lived experience. It depicts a community completely dependent on—indeed, entrusted to—the patriarchy, in which a young woman, apparently submissive to her husband and family's will, instead finds the courage to oppose traditions. The direction and screenplay powerfully yet calmly describe Zulma's simplicity as she, faced with a tragic event, manages to break her trust in the very rules that oppressed her.

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