A new film (2025) about Mother Teresa, called ‘Mother’, has emerged from Macedonia, and follows the Albanian-Indian Catholic nun as she establishes the Missionaries of Charity, a religious congregation initially dedicated to serving “the poorest of the poor” in the slums of Kolkata, India.
Born in 1910 as Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, in Skopje (then part of the Ottoman Empire, now the capital of North Macedonia), Mother Teresa was raised in a devoutly Catholic family. At the age of 18, she moved to Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto and later to India, where she lived most of her life and carried out her missionary work.
The film, which was world premiered at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, is a fictional account that follows seven days in Mother Teresa’s life when she decides to leave her convent and establish her own religious order.
During a train journey, she is said to have experienced her “calling within a calling”: to not live only for God, but for and among the poorest of the poor. She appears in the film as a woman searching for her calling amid ruins and hardship. But this is no slushy film about a perfect Catholic icon. On the contrary, the film critically, though respectfully, portrays Teresa, with some of the controversies she faced in her life, being hinted at.
She was canonised by the Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta. The anniversary of her death, 5 September, is now observed as her feast day.
Read the story on Deutsche Welle here.
Photo above: Mother Teresa taken at St Aloysius Church, Washington DC, by Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA – Mother Teresa best © copyright 2010, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74493804