Populating the Margins: Hope and Healing in Claudia Llosa's La teta asustada

Abstract

In La teta asustada (The Milk of Sorrow, 2009), Peruvian director Claudia Llosa explores the lasting effects of the violence that dominated her home country from about 1980 to 2000. Llosa's story, with national implications, is centered on the pain of one individual, Fausta, a young Quechua woman, who believes that she has inherited the trauma of her Indigenous mother's rape. Llosa represents Fausta's personal suffering by placing the protagonist physically in the margins of the frame, a metaphorical mise-en-scène that is repeated in the barren and impoverished neighborhood where she lives on the outskirts of Lima. And yet Llosa's film is not deterministic; rather, it is a search for personal and national healing through families and communities.