Mother
Drama • 2025 • 1h 44m
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
In Mother, the canonical image of Mother Teresa is deconstructed, transformed into a portrait that rejects the comforting cliché of the sacred icon and ventures into less-trodden existential territories. The film explores the human substance of the nun not as distant sanctity, but as a living, fragile, and contradictory experience: a woman suspended between devotion and doubt, between imposed constraints and inner freedom. What emerges is not a biography, but a radical exploration of being in motion, of the moral and spiritual weight carried by those who choose total dedication to others.
“The body is the surface on which power is exercised; discipline shapes it, bends it, and determines its strength.”
— Michel Foucault
— Michel Foucault
In Mother, the canonical image of Mother Teresa is deconstructed, transformed into a portrait that rejects the comforting cliché of the sacred icon and ventures into less-trodden existential territories. The film explores the human substance of the nun not as distant sanctity, but as a living, fragile, and contradictory experience: a woman suspended between devotion and doubt, between imposed constraints and inner freedom. What emerges is not a biography, but a radical exploration of being in motion, of the moral and spiritual weight carried by those who choose total dedication to others.
In this framework, the rigor of self-imposed rules does not appear merely as discipline: their extreme severity becomes a symptom of profound difficulty, an attempt to find order within inner chaos. Likewise, the conflict with motherhood — with the sacrifice of the body and the possibility of generating life — manifests as a constant shadow, signaling the tension between responsibility and personal desire. The ambivalence of her experience, oscillating between acceptance and rejection, cruelty and mercy, marks every gesture and decision, generating an emotional density that the direction also conveys through the musical choice: the soundtrack of Hard Rock Hallelujah by Lordi, extreme and sophisticated, accompanies the protagonist’s inner contradictions, accentuating her radicality and moral dissonance in powerful contrast to the traditional image of sanctity.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta awaited permission from Pope Pius XII in 1948 to found the Congregation of the Missionaries of Charity. At that time, she was still a nun at the Loreto Convent in Calcutta and felt the call to dedicate herself entirely to the poorest of the poor. Before leaving the convent to start her new community, she requested papal authorization to ensure that her foundation would be officially recognized by the Catholic Church.
Mitevska eschews the rhetoric of miracles and immaculate ideals, choosing instead to probe the void, the tensions, the fears, and the solitude that traverse the protagonist during the seven days preceding her most crucial decision: leaving the safety of the convent to found the Missionaries of Charity. The day-by-day structure, integrated with carefully designed and striking graphics, frames the narrative as a ritualized journey, where every moment is measured and weighted, reflecting the obsession with control and discipline that accompanies the protagonist. Far from any myth, the film compels the viewer to confront the very nature of responsibility, compassion, and sacrifice: what does it truly mean to bear the suffering of others? What inner price does a love that knows no limits and requires extreme rules entail?
The narrative intensifies through sequences that escape all expectation, at the edge of hypnotic and psychologically disturbing. Some scenes emerge as sudden visions, suspended between dream and reality, in which the protagonist’s experience of sacrifice manifests in sometimes incomprehensible forms. Images of constraint and contrition take on an almost oneiric quality, like flashes of nightmare violently traversing the screen, conveying to the viewer the extreme tension of one living under the weight of faith, doubt, and total dedication. Every unexpected sequence, every visual fragment, seems to probe the boundary between perception and hallucination, transforming the narrative into a hypnotic flow of emotions and reflections on the cost of sanctity and bodily sacrifice.
The storytelling slides between intimacy and abstraction, constructing a sensory and psychological path that destabilizes expectations. Noomi Rapace embodies a figure that is not mythologized but authentically vulnerable, translating on screen the unease, the desire for meaning, and the moral radicality of a woman who constantly faces dilemmas that defy common logic.
Mother is a film situated at the margins of traditional representation, inviting contemplation of spirituality as a concrete, tormented, and unexpected experience. It is a work that shakes shared imagination, proposing an alternative and profound vision of Mother Teresa: not only a symbol of sanctity but an existential figure immersed in a world of contradictions, extreme choices, and radical acts of humanity. The film thus becomes a philosophical journey, a reflection on the possibility of transforming suffering into an act of love and on the cost of total adherence to an ideal, marked by a nearly liturgical rhythm and accompanied by formal and musical elements that amplify its emotional power.
“The female body is the theater of contradictions that society attempts to define; freedom is measured by the ability to live them.”
— Simone de Beauvoir
— Simone de Beauvoir
