I, the Worst of All

Maria Luisa Bemberg's 1990 Argentine film is about the nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, living in seventeenth-century Mexico. She writes in the convent, studies science and becomes one of the best-known intellectuals of her time; the church sees this as a problem. The subject is being asked to give up writing. As the pressure grows Sor Juana has to surrender her library and her instruments; the narrative shows this not as martyrdom but as a systematic silencing. The screenplay rests on Octavio Paz's study of her. Bemberg shot entirely in the studio and kept the setting deliberately artificial; the staging is close to theatre. Assumpta Serna leads. Who it's for: those who like Latin American cinema and historical portraits of women. Who it's not for: viewers expecting a realist period film; the film uses a stylised stage language.