Ruben Östlund Regular Partner Film i Väst Hikes Co-Pros with Noomi Rapace Starrer ‘Mother,’ Flags Five Films in Cannes (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Annika Pham Billed the ‘Trollywood’ of the North for its close ties to talent, the leading Scandinavian regional film fund Film i Väst in Sweden’s Trollhättan has boarded the Noomi Rapace starrer “Mother, to be helmed by Macedonia’s Teona Stugar Mitevska.

The biopic, in which Rapace will play the legendary religious figure Mother Teresa, will mark the English-language debut of esteemed auteur Mitevska, credited for the 2019 Berlin entry “God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya”. “I am Macedonian, and I grew up in Skopje- Mother Teresa’s birth place,” Mitevska told Variety. “I didn’t grow up religious, as it was Yugoslavia at the time and we were all atheist or existentialists, but I grew up in a vast family of strong dominant women, almost a matriarchy.” The director says she got the idea for the pic while working on the docu series “Teresa and I” for Macedonian television, more than a decade ago.

Mother Teresa’ s inspiring persona, not as a religious icon but as an empowering female figure, is what sparked Mitevska’s wish to make this feature. “During the making of the documentary, I discovered an army of women within her religious community: The missionaries of charity and yes: I was hooked.

Just as Mary Ward proclaims: Women for women, so did she. She had a rebel punk rock energy that spreads like a virus; she was a general of an army of women,” says Mitevska.