LFF: Teona Strugar Mitevska on fact vs. fiction in Mother
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska to discuss her latest film, Mother, at the Filmmakers Afternoon Tea event during the London Film Festival.
Mother, starring Noomi Rapace as Mother Teresa, is a fictional account depicting a pivotal five days as the Catholic nun prepares to leave her convent and start a new religious order. Mitevska, who also wrote the film, shot the project for four weeks in Belgium and two weeks in India and premiered the drama at the Venice Film Festival.
Mitevksa, who is preparing to “circle the globe a few times in the next two months” with her film, spoke to Miss Flicks about creating the character of Mother Teresa, casting her and balancing fact and fiction in Mother.
With your film Mother, it must have been quite a challenge to find someone to play Mother Teresa, as she’s such a well-known public figure.
Actually, it was a challenge, really. We were lucky with Noomi because when we proposed her the script, by chance, she saw a film of mine, God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya, and she loved the film and she said, ‘Oh, yes, let’s do this!’ But anyway, to come to the idea of her, yes, it took me some time in the process of writing the character to understand who the Mother Teresa I want to present in the film is and then, of course, to match and find the equivalent of the person.
Of course, any good actor can embody any role, but there is a sort of something, you know, the power or the character or the little details or intricacies that we carry inside of ourselves that you can start with and build up on. So really I was looking for that person. While we were creating the character, what I discovered about Mother Teresa was that she was extremely rebellious; she was the Robin Hood of her time, the way she took and gave, she was a general. As I was discovering her, I said, ‘Oh my God, if I do make this film the way I want to make it, there should be some kind of punk rock energy.’
Noomi came to mind because she does carry within her a certain… she’s like a ball of energy, very similar to the picture that was painted to me of who Mother Teresa was. And then once I met Noomi, we sort of just built on that, but that was the starting point, of course, before that.
How concerned were you about getting the appearance and voice correct?
No, we were not worried about it. When you do the research, very little is left of Mother Teresa. Well, there is a lot left, but usually she’s over 50, 70, you know, and our Mother Teresa, she’s 37. It’s a waste of time to try and completely copy. I think it’s important to propose a notion of a character, of a woman, the type of woman she was, and this is really what we were working on.
But talking about the accent, that was important, because of course, she could not talk with a British accent. She was Albanian from Macedonia, so it had to be a Slavic-English accent, you know, the way I speak. This is something Noomi really worked hard on. Well, not only that. She really also worked on the physical aspect of her because she had a physical way of moving and understanding her body – that was very interesting – that she tried to also capture. I think a year and a half, we were in it. During the year and a half, she slowly massaged and built the character of Mother.
It’s a fictional account, but with a real person. How did you go about balancing fact and fiction in your script?
That is the amazingly tricky and complex part. The character in many of the dialogues in the film are actually direct transcriptions from interviews we did with the five sisters left, that we did interviews with 17 years ago, while I was doing a documentary, Mother and I. By doing these interviews and doing this documentary, I fell in love with the character of Mother, so I only built upon that.
It’s important to be current; we are the voices of the time we live in. For me, it was important to make a film about a female historical character, somebody that in the film I present almost as a feminist figure because there’s a power within her. The way the character was built was based on these interviews and also on her private diary that captures her doubts about her womanhood, religion, God, etc etc.
The character of Father Friedrich is an actual person that was her confessor who existed and who she had a very close relationship to. And because of this closeness, the rest of the sisters of the order became jealous and sort of sent her away on holiday. The character of Agnieszka is completely a fiction.
I could not avoid the subject of abortion. It could have been possible, but for me, as a woman, it was not possible not to talk about this. Because it is about the time we live in and it is about understanding where we were 100 years ago and where we are today and how we feel about our bodies then and now and the freedoms we have had and not had and the freedoms we have today, freedoms we must keep, so really it is a combination of things that are there and things that are important for me as an artist, and even more importantly, as a woman.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Mother is currently showing at the London Film Festival. It does not have a release date yet