Opening the Orizzonti section, Mother by Teona Strugar Mitevska revisits a little-known episode in Mother Teresa’s life, portraying a complex, determined, and deeply human woman. In this interview, the Macedonian director reflects on building the character, the contrasts of Kolkata in 1948, and her collaboration with Noomi Rapace and Sylvia Hoeks, the film’s leading actresses, in a work that combines history, faith, and contemporary issues of gender and power.
Mother tells a little-known episode from Mother Teresa’s life. What made you focus specifically on this particular moment in her life?
It is details that reveal or make a character; it is moments that make life. Making a film about a historical person was always clear to me: choose a pivotal moment that defines who they are and who they become. Not too far from Sokurov’s tetralogy – Taurus, Moloch, The Sun and Faust. Mother is the fifth edition– a joke!!! But my search goes further: I wanted to make a film about a person like you and me, not a saint – the woman behind the myth. Fifteen years ago, I made a documentary series, Teresa and I. It was then that I discovered the rich and multi-layered character of Mother Teresa, nothing like what we see and hear in the mainstream media. I fell in love with the strength of her character, her drive, her ambition. And this is what I believed the world needed to discover and see. Everything after that was about finding the right format for the story, a format that would include all the ideas I find dear: womanhood, sisterhood, colonization, capitalist exploitation…
The film deals with themes such as faith, compassion, and moral choices in a very specific historical context. How did you work to convey both the inner complexity of the protagonist and the atmosphere of Kolkata in 1948?
The two worlds portrayed in the film stand as complete opposites, the contrast is stark and painful: the chaos of the streets of Kolkata versus the serenity of the Entally Loreto convent; light versus dark, quiet versus unbearable noise, security and plentitude versus death and poverty. In historical context, this was moment of great change: the end of the British colonial rule, the division of India, as well as the leftovers of the Bengali famine. Mother Teresa, then a young woman, was a witness to it all. The rules were clear: she was to remain enclosed in her artificial paradise of the Loreto convent, a condition she was unable to bear. The careful use and modulation of this contrast, together with the seven-day time frame helped intensify Mother’s inner life. Through the stream-of-consciousness narration, the spectator is allowed to see the world through her eyes, brought into close and vivid contact with a character from another time.
Set in Calcutta in 1948, Mother follows seven decisive days in the life of Mother Teresa (Noomi Rapace) before founding the Missionaries of Charity. When she receives Vatican permission to leave the St. Mary’s convent to start her own community, she is confronted wi...
You often tell stories of women who challenge conventions and predefined roles. Do you see a common thread connecting Mother with titles like God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya or The Happiest Man in the World?
It is true, all of my female characters do exactly that, and so does Mother, the most audacious of them all. She was a CEO, a general of an army, a rebel and a Robin Hood. I do not see her character as too far from who I am, a woman of today. The challenge of incorporating this contemporary aspect into the character of Mother was my goal. Her story takes place almost a century ago, yet she is no different than you and me. A proof that women have always rebelled, then as well as now. By putting these characters on the big screen, I claim our right to be: imperfect, beautiful, and free. I compare the process of constructing this film to waving a maze, concerning the construction of the story as well as in relation to us, the writers (Goce Smilevski e Elma Tataragić) and my own desire to tackle the points that matter to us. The film questions and problematises some serious and urgent intellectual issues of power, ambition, and gender roles. From the very beginning, it was pivotal to put forward a female historical character without falling into the trap of the usual romantic notions of a perfect woman or mother, but instead to present a multi-layered complex entity.
In your films, places seem to carry as much importance as the characters themselves. Thinking about Kolkata in Mother, or Skopje and Sarajevo in your previous works, what does “filming a place” mean to you, and how does it influence the storytelling?
Filming a place is telling a story, and it is one of the most beautiful moments of my job as a filmmaker. I have been known to change entire scenes because of a place, a location. But Mother was something different, unlike anything I had done before. I was shooting in a new land, within a culture I hardly knew. For example, their concept of “now”, their understanding of time is completely different from ours. It is easy, as a Westerner, to try to impose your own ideas, to present yourself as superior – colonialism was all about this, after all. I had to make a deliberate effort to go against my pre-conceived notions, to start seeing and listening as they do, to learn. Only then did I truly start filming the place. And of course, reviewing all of Satyajit Raj’s films did me no harm – it was a complete lesson of humility.
This is your first film in English and features an international cast led by Noomi Rapace and Sylvia Hoeks. How did you experience this compared to your previous works?
I had always wanted to make a film in a language other than my own, and I had been planning this moment and this project for a long time. It is about having the confidence to know you are ready. Now that I have jumped into the water, I wonder why I didn’t do it earlier. It is amazing to work with actors of the stature of Noomi and Sylvia. With Noomi, we prepared the character of Mother for a year and a half, hard work is the way. It is not so much about rehearsing as it is about working on embodying the character. From a director’s point of view, it was striking living through Noomi’s full transformation. I will never forget the moment of realisation. She called me with a trembling voice, within a fragility I have never felt before. She was afraid, and it was then that I knew she had arrived, she had fully embodied the character, even the strongest fear. Finding frailty within the strength of Mother’s character was the final step. My body still shakes when I remember that exact moment. It was beautiful. That was when I knew we had reached a point of convergence of three life paths, Noomi’s, mine and Mother’s. We were one. Sylvia joined the picture a bit later in the picture. I was looking for someone who would stand as the opposite of Noomi, both physically and emotionally. A picture of a weeping willow kept playing in my head. When I met Sylvia, I immediately felt that she was the one: she as the sorrow, Noomi as the strength of a One.
