Madeinusa

With her successful and skillfully made first feature, Llosa offers the viewer a glimpse into an unknown, inaccessible and slowly disappearing world. A world of poverty and opulent religious ritual, but also the world in which a girl grows up and starts asking questions about things that used to be taken for granted. A remote mountain village in Peru. The ‘tiempo santo’ is the high point of the year for the villagers. Every year, a young girl from the village is chosen as Holy Virgin, after which she passes in procession through the village, takes the statue of Jesus from the cross and covers his eyes. Immediately afterwards, the carnivalesque feast ensues and people do everything God has forbidden. This year, the beautiful Madeinusa has been chosen as the virgin. Together with her sister, she looks after her father, the mayor of the village, who regularly comes home drunk and then worms his way into bed between the girls. So far Madeinusa has managed to keep her father off her ‘because she wants to stay a virgin’. But during the holy week, there are no sins and Madeinusa is threatened with disaster. The arrival of Salvador, a gringo from the big city who gets stranded in the village during the festive week, to the dismay of the villagers, will influence the fate of Madeinusa. (SdH)