Juana Ines de la Cruz was one of the first and most talented Latin American poets and playwrights of modern times. From an early age, showing a passion for learning, at the age of 9, thanks to her wit and reading, she became the first lady-in-waiting at court. At the age of 20, Juana chose the fate of a nun to continue studying the sciences, without obstacles in the form of marriage and maternal imperatives dictated by the Catholic society of the XVII century. But she soon realized that even marriage to Christ and the monastic bars that seemed to separate her from the patriarchal world, where female nature is associated with everything defective and diabolical, did not give her intellectual freedom.
Under the guise of a historical biopic about a famous nun scientist, the film gives out openly feminist criticism of the church, politics, science, society, not only Spanish or Argentine, but rather on the scale of the entire Catholic culture of Europe. Somewhere – competently, somewhere overdoes, but without excessive drama and categoricalness, which are inherent in standard historical dramas. The form of the film is comparable to the heroine herself and her prototype - the real Juana de la Cruz, who tried to combine piety with poetry, sincere religiosity with the desire for free thinking (and in this, in fact, reflected her time). So in this Argentine film adaptation – figurative minimalism is combined with the desire for documentary realism in the depiction of disputes about the rational and spiritual, divine and diabolical, male and female.
In the end, despite a fair amount of feminist bias, not so often shoot such high-quality biographical tapes about strong-willed women-passionaries, no matter what, resisting the absurdity of established systems.