Seven days in the remarkable life of Mother Teresa

“I present this Mother almost as a CEO of a multinational company-relentless and ambitious,” says Teona Strugar Mitevska about her new feature film based on Mother Teresa. Mitevska knows a thing or two about the Nobel Peace Prize-winning founder of the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata. She is a Macedonian, as Mother Teresa was before the famous nun became an Indian citizen. She was also born in the same town, Skopje, in the landlocked Balkan country (formerly part of Albania) in Southeast Europe where Mother Teresa was born in 1910.

Mother, Mitevska’s new film screened at the 22nd Marrakech International Film Festival in Morocco this week, is set in Kolkata in 1948. Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun and then principal of St Mary’s Bengali-medium school for girls in the city, is waiting for the Vatican’s permission to start a new order for serving the poor. Narrated over a span of seven days in August 1948 as Mother Teresa awaits the Vatican letter, the English-language film mixes fact and fiction to reimagine her spirit and commitment to the cause she believed in. Shot in Kolkata in October last year, the film stars Noomi Rapace, the Swedish actor famous for her role as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as the then 37-year-old Mother Teresa. “We chose to tell her story before she became the Mother Teresa we know today. Our Mother is thirty-seven years old, and the film follows seven days in her life,” says Mitevska, who has previously made a documentary on her compatriot, called Teresa and I (2013), which was also

shot in Kolkata.

While Mother shows the determination of the nun from the Loreto order in Kolkata to help the poor with a new mission, the film also raises questions about her stance on abortion, aimed at making her own life and the rights and freedom of women as relevant to the contemporary world as before.

While facts dominate the narrative of the 103-minute film, fiction is introduced to raise questions about the controversial figure of Mother Teresa, another widely known element of her popular personality. The film’s main characters include a fictional Loreto nun, known only as Sister Agnieszka, who reveals to Mother Teresa during her wait for the Vatican’s permission to start the Missionaries of Charity that she is pregnant with a child. Shocked by the revelation, Mother Teresa locks up Sister Agnieszka — whom she considers her successor to the role of principal in their school-in her room and refuses to help her abort the child. Her vulnerabilities and failings as an ordinary human being come to the fore just before she creates the Missionaries of Charity, a work that would make her a global humanitarian model and lead her on the road to sainthood. “She was far from perfect, but she was truly remarkable,” says Mitevska, also known for her works like the 2019 feature film God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunija. “Mother Teresa was a mother indeed, but to millions. She was strict, harsh, a disciplinarian, yet motherly beyond our comprehension,” adds Mitevska, who met all five last-surviving nuns who worked with Mother Teresa before her death in 1997. Mother, which opened the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival in September this year, has since become a favourite at major international film festivals across the world. In the early scenes of the film, Mother Teresa is shown walking through the narrow alleys of Kolkata and distributing food and medicines to leprosy patients. “One must give an example if you want others to follow,” Mother Teresa tells a nun in one scene. “Is it a crime?” she asks when questioned about her apparent lack of faith by a priest who responds to her feelings of being trapped inside the walls of the convent after sending letters to the Vatican for permission to start the Missionaries of Charity. “I have been writing these letters for the last seven years,” she says. “I read Mother Teresa’s letters written during 1948. She went through a tough period after the Vatican approved her decision to start the Missionaries of Charity. She was scared and doubted her decision in the initial two years,” says Rapace, who delivers the role of Mother Teresa as a “rebellious woman” in a man’s world who broke new ground in creating the Missionaries of Charity order.

The author is a senior journalist and a film critic; views are personal