About Santa Evita
Santa Evita is a 2022 Argentine historical miniseries adapted from Tomas Eloy Martinez's acclaimed novel of the same name. It follows the strange, true odyssey of the embalmed body of Eva Peron, the beloved first lady known to millions simply as Evita, in the turbulent years after her death from cancer in 1952. What begins as an act of devotion, preserving her remains so that the nation might continue to venerate her, becomes a decades-long struggle for control of a corpse that has been transformed into a political symbol.
After the 1955 coup that overthrew Juan Domingo Peron, the new military government fears that Eva's body could become a rallying point for her devoted followers. The remains are seized, hidden, and moved in secret, entrusted to a military intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Moori Koenig, whose assignment slowly consumes him. As the body passes through cities and borders, it accrues a near-mythic power over those who guard it, while the doctor who embalmed her, Pedro Ara, regards his work as a sacred act of art and science.
Told with a sober, literary sensibility and moving between past and present, the series weaves the rise of Eva Peron, from provincial obscurity to the heart of Argentine political life, together with the clandestine journey of her remains. Produced by Salma Hayek Pinault's Ventanarosa and directed by Rodrigo Garcia and Alejandro Maci, Santa Evita treats its subject as both an intimate portrait and a meditation on memory, myth, and the uses a nation makes of its dead.