San Francisco director Vicky Funari's Paulina is a provocative film about a woman's lifelong struggle to live on her own terms. When she was a child, Paulina Cruz Suárez's parents traded her away to the town boss for land rights. At 15, after being kept as an unwilling mistress, Paulina escaped to Mexico City where she found work as a maid. The story of Paulina's fall from grace and return to her village to confront her parents and villagers about her tragic past goes full circle in this nonfiction feature film, shot on location in rural Veracruz and Mexico City. Funari navigates through critical social issues and challenges her audience to sort out the various truths embedded in the shifting perspectives of the film's interviewees. Shown with The Ballad of Cecilia Rios (Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, U.S., 1997, 14 mins), how a community came to terms with its loss by transforming a girl's short life and dreadful death into myth.