In her first feature film Maternal (2019), Italian documentarist Maura Delpero enters a hogar in Buenos Aires where nuns provide a shelter for young and poor single mothers, and within the sacred space of the convent, her camera reveals the complexities of the maternal bond, displaying a juxtaposition of sacred and secular elements that shape feminine identities and the construction of motherhood. The iconographic Holy Family and the model of the Virgin Mary that influence the idealized Christian cultural imaginary surface from the nun’s teaching classes but are disrupted by the three female protagonists who offer alternative representations of the maternal and show the fragility and vulnerabilities of women’s feelings: Luci has a daughter and is not ready to devote herself and her time to being a mother, Fatima is pregnant with her second child and attentive to her son but unable to relate to him, and Sister Paola soon discovers that she is not as ready as she thought to take the perpetual vows, developing maternal feelings for Luci’s daughter. The aim of this contribution is to show how, by alternating different registers within the space of the hogar, Delpero makes her cinema a site of resistance against societal expectations, enriching our screens with a new and original representation of the maternal that breaks from traditional portrayals and ideologies, and urges us to see that maternity cannot always be the sublime realm of caring and nurturing, of submissiveness and passivity, and that human behavior has no single setting.