Irmã Dulce

A nun in Bahia gives her life to patients nobody else will take. Across the decades from the forties to the eighties she builds a hospital, brings in people she finds on the street, and when there is no room left turns even a chicken yard into a ward. Against her stand an incurable respiratory illness, a society that does not take women seriously, indifferent politicians, and at times the rules of her own church. Vicente Amorim shot the film in Salvador. Its subject is Maria Rita de Sousa Brito Lopes Pontes, known as the good angel of Bahia, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and later canonised by the Catholic Church. The film does not present her as a saint but as somebody who got tired and carried on anyway.