AllMovie

Director Claudia Llosa follows her award-winning feature directorial debut, Madeinusa, with this stark meditation on a grim period of South American history in which approximately 70,000 people were murdered between the years 1980 and 2000. Fausta (Magaly Solier) has fallen ill with a disease passed down from mother to daughter through breast milk. But Fausta's affliction isn't biological; it strictly affects Peruvian women who were raped or abused during those two terrible decades of persecution. While those days are long gone, Fausta stands as a living reminder of the horrors that once plagued her country, her malady a deep-rooted fear that stripped the young innocent of her soul. After Fausta's mother dies, the horrified girl is forced to confront her greatest fear by staring straight into the black heart of her own paranoia. Now, as Fausta sets out to discover her own path to freedom, she inserts a potato into her vagina in order to protect her body from unwanted intruders.