Costa Rica

Clara is believed to be a healer; she is about 40 years old and there is one who has decided for her what will be her life: her mother.

"God gave her to me this way and this is how I'm going to keep her."

Born with a curved spine that damages her posture and certain organs, as well as granting her severe pain, she should be operated on but her mother does not consent, leaving Clara relegated to a sacrificial life enslaved to the exploitation of superstition.

Her only solace is her relationship with nature, with which she entertains herself by exchanging moods, smells, tastes and fate, along with her mare Yuca, also exploited to entertain tourists.

Once a stranger arrives in the village, devoted to the madonna, something new happens in the religious and oppressive context. The discovery of the body of her 15-year-old granddaughter and the awakening of Clara's carefully concealed and anesthetized dormant urges will completely overwhelm the deforming expectations and planning of the hapless woman's life.

The depiction of the niece's quinceanera i.e., the ceremony of biological passage to sexual maturity, succeeds in highlighting the essentially scaramantic/cultural/ archaic nature of certain rites of passage nevertheless denied to Clara.

An exhausting first part, where a circular claustrophobic quotidianity suffocates this woman's life counterpoints a vibrant turn in the second where drives take over from the mortifications that her mother's psychopathology has predicted as her daughter's fate.

It is a film reminiscent of Hausner's themes in Lourdes and Hans Christian Schmid's Requiem, with a cathartic ending where only from the flames and destruction of idolatry can Clara's phoenix Arabian phoenix be reborn from its own supposed ashes.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice