War’s horrors passed on in ‘The Milk of Sorrow’

When Claudia Llosa was growing up in Lima, Peru, adolescence wasn’t a time for hanging out with friends in the streets. The country was in the grip of a brutal civil war pitting the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas against a government determined to stamp them out at any cost.

“The message was, ‘Stay inside! Hide yourself! Be careful!’ ” Llosa, 33, recalled recently during an interview at a West Hollywood hotel, speaking in Spanish. “I knew that I would speak of the theme one day, but I didn’t know how to come face to face with it. It was a reality that changed everything. How do you tell that?”

Now Llosa has confronted that transformative era with her feature film “The Milk of Sorrow” (La Teta Asustada), one of five movies competing Sunday for the foreign-language film Oscar. The first Peruvian feature nominated in that category, it won the Golden Bear award for best movie at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. It’s seeking a U.S. distributor.

The movie’s Spanish title (literally, “the scared breast”) refers to a condition that affected Peruvian women, mainly Andean Indians, who were raped and assaulted during the war, and reputedly transmitted their trauma through their breast milk to their children. The phenomenon, part physical-psychological and part spiritual-folkloric, has been documented by Harvard University anthropologist Kimberly Theidon, whose writings helped inspire Llosa’s screenplay.

The movie’s young heroine, Fausta (Magaly Solier), suffering from the affliction, has left her mountain village to come live with her uncle’s family in one of Lima’s steeply terraced shantytowns. Fausta’s fear of men is so great that she has inserted a potato into her vagina to repulse potential rapists, as other war victims did.

Images of sterility and fertility, decay and regeneration, permeate the film, which uses mostly non-professional actors to fashion a hybrid of lyrical imagery and nuanced social commentary wrapped in compassion.

Although the war has ended, the conflicts it laid bare still haunt Peru. Her film’s philosophical tensions reflect Llosa’s desire to acknowledge the war’s harsh legacy, yet also look toward reconciliation.

“What I wanted to speak of is the past, or the representation of the past as it relates to right now,” Llosa said. “How are we going to manage in these days this sadness, this wound that stays open? I wanted to make a movie that connects the audience with the idea of the violence and the terror. At the same time, I wanted to show people that are capable of putting an end to their pain.”

The film joins a growing cadre of Latin American movies that address issues of ethnic bias and simmering class inequality. To earn money to bury her mother, Fausta goes to work as a domestic servant for a light-skinned, upper-class female pianist. The gulf between them is expressed most pointedly through differences in music and language: although Fausta speaks Spanish, her mother tongue is Quechua.

Llosa, the niece of novelist and one-time Peruvian presidential candidate Mario Vargas-Llosa, said that although she was raised in cosmopolitan Lima, her parents (an artist and a businessman) took the family on frequent Andean trips. “I breathed, I absorbed this idea of a fractured country, a country that doesn’t communicate with itself,” said the filmmaker, who now lives in Barcelona.

Llosa had met Solier years earlier, when Solier was selling food in a plaza in the Ayacucho region, former epicenter of Shining Path activity. Llosa cast her in her first feature, “Madeinusa.” Solier, 23, also a popular singer in Peru, conveys a forceful personality in a quiet, internalized way, Llosa said. “It’s an energy. You can see it in her eyes when you look at them.”

José María Morales, one of the film’s producers, said that although the movie’s political context is very localized, its themes -- immigration, family, war’s dislocations -- are universal. He considers its subject to be “a woman who is stuck by herself in a new world” and must rapidly adapt while forging a truce with her past.

The unity of such seemingly antagonistic forces underlies the movie’s sensibility, said Llosa, who recently gave birth to her first child. In Quechua, she noted, the word for “seed” and for a shrouded corpse, or “mummy,” is the same because life and death are accepted as inseparable.

“What the film is saying is that there’s validity in life” and death, Llosa said. “The stairs [in Fausta’s village] that go up and down show the difficulty, the impossibility, of the terrain. It also shows a people that is capable of surmounting anything. There’s always this double manner in life.”

reed.johnson@latimes.com