But then something
happens, something that proves the novel's mise - en - scène: he heals a plague - stricken and
orphaned young woman, Ustina (whose name is derived originally from the Latin Iustinus), darlings her, impregnates her, possesses her, and, eventually, inadvertently kills her and their child during labor.
Based on an actual case that
happened in Romania's Moldova region in 2005, the film unfolds in and around a remote monastery where pious
young women — many of them
orphans who have merely migrated from one form of institutional living to another — toil dutifully under the ever - watchful eye of an austere priest known as Papa (played by the excellent Valeriu Andriuta).