The Milk of Sorrow

Fausta lives in a poor district of Lima, gripped by a folk belief that the terror her mother suffered as a rape victim during Peru's years of political violence has passed into her through breast milk. Paralysed by fear of the world and of men, she takes work in a wealthy household and struggles to raise the money to carry her dead mother's body home for burial.

The film gives vivid form to transgenerational trauma, imagined as something carried in the body and inherited from a mother who was harmed before her daughter was born. It offers a therapist a poetic case study of how the violence of one generation can shape the fears of the next. It won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2009.