Private pain versus public shame: González Sinde’s female lawyer in La suerte dormida/Sleeping Luck (2003)

This article analyses the representation of a female lawyer whose personal tragedy encourages her to become a heroine lawyer for the socially disadvantaged. It explores a female filmmaker’s account of a woman lawyer fighting for a lost cause and examines in what way the public/private, law/justice and reason/emotion dichotomies are played out in her public performance and private life. Central to my discussion will be the significance of emotion in filmmaking, law and social justice. I use Carl Plantinga’s seminal work on the emotional experience of the spectator and his cognitive-perceptual account of the viewing process, and combine it with a fruitful discussion of the genre of female lawyer films, as theorized by Cynthia Lucia and Orit Kamir in two pioneering studies on female lawyer films. This article fills a significant critical gap in the field of Spanish law and film. Positioned at the intersection between law, film and emotion, it gives space to a productive cross-fertilization of theories of spectatorship and the female lawyer film.