Because of the dread inspired in her by her the horrors of systematic sexual violence her mother suffered during the Shining Path years in Peru, Fausta keeps a potato lodged in her vagina as a precaution. Fausta also suffers this fear as a disease contracted from her mother’s breast milk?the milk of sorrow. Those are the dominant and dramatic metaphors that inform Claudia Llosa’s searing examination of emotional inheritance lingering neocolonial mores. Based on the subject matter, [The Milk of Sorrow] could have been lurid or sordid in its portrait of fear as it is passed from one generation to the next, but Llosa never allows sensationalism to guide her film. Combining sequences set in the small mountain village of Fausta’s birth with her burgeoning life in Lima, Llosa contrasts the superstitions of the village with the modernity of the city, ultimately finding the same indignities, embedded misogyny, and internalized racism that stems from violence everywhere. Winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2009.