The Milk of Sorrow

Director: Claudia Llosa

2009 / 94min / DCP

Winner of the Golden Bear at the 59th Berlin International Film Festival, Llosa’s formidable sophomore feature focuses on Fausta (Magaly Solier, in a performance nearly free of dialogue), the only daughter of an aged Indigenous Peruvian woman who, following her mother’s death, must negotiate arrangements for her burial as well as negotiate the smothering legacy of trauma that her parent, horribly misused during the Shining Path terrorist insurgencies of the 1980s and ’90s, has left behind with her child even after herself departing this mortal coil. “Littered with unforgettable images of incongruity, destruction, and, finally, healing” [The Village Voice], The Milk of Sorrow is an exquisitely shot study in inherited injury guarded like a precious heirloom, a work of tragic magic realism.

Distributor: WandaVision

Part of In Her Shadow