The Venice Film Festival may be a beacon for its buzzy premieres and starry red carpets, but there are plenty of other intriguing projects making their world premieres here that could easily be overlooked. The three films I’m highlighting in this dispatch involve crisis of family and faith: Mother and Milk Teeth, which both premiered in the festival’s Orizzonti section, and Hijira, which screened in the Venice Spotlight section.
When you think of Mother Teresa, the Catholic nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity devoted to helping the sick and poor, and after her death was named a saint, “punk” is likely not the word that comes to mind. But that’s the exact energy that Teona Strugar Mitevska brings to her film Mother, an idiosyncratic interpretation of seven days in the life of Teresa (played by Noomi Rapace) circa 1948, as she serves as Mother Superior of the Sisters of Loreto convent in Calcutta, India, and anxiously awaits word from the Vatican as to whether her request to break away and form her own congregation— following a message she received from God— was approved. The head-banging music and enormous stylized title cards that open Mother, paired with a heated confrontation she has soon after with Father Friedrich (Nikola Ristanovski) in which she emphasizes the struggles of being a woman in a man’s business, point to the film’s portrayal of Teresa as a rebellious figure, one who wants to make her own rules as opposed to following others. But she faces an even greater test when her fellow sister and close friend, the person she intended to recommend succeed her as Mother Superior, Sister Agnieszka (an overwrought Sylvia Hoeks), reveals that she is pregnant.
Fifteen years ago, Mitevska made a documentary titled Teresa and I, in which she spoke with four of the last living members of Mother Teresa’s order. Some of the memories they shared make it in to her fictionalized account of her subject: her penchant for rearranging the furniture in the rooms, her insistence on employing brain power over relying on machines and tools. But Mitevska largely uses this made-up incident as an avenue to attempt to untangle the various contradictions that made Teresa as much a controversial a figure as a revered one. This specifically regards her staunch anti-abortion stance, a topic the film itself makes a clear objection to via Teresa’s confessor.
The remainder of Mother, however, stands on more uncertain footing. It’s stylistically bold, using not only punk music to accent Teresa’s moments of distress and doubt but also switching to a handheld camera, closing tight in on characters and positioning them off-kilter, on the far edges of the frame. But Mother can never seem to decide if it’s a serious portrait of a crisis of faith, or an anthem for female empowerment; the whiplash as it switches between the two is sometimes severe. But Rapace is a marvel, calibrating her performance to move between austere and fraught and soft with a deftness that makes all those questions so much more prevalent.
An enigmatic road movie set in Saudi Arabia, Hijira opens with Sitti (Khairia Nazmi), traveling by bus across the desert with her two granddaughters, older Sarah and 12-year-old Janna (Lamar Feddan) to go to Mecca to perform Hajj. But at one of their stops, Sarah vanishes into a crowd. There’s some suspicion that she may have run off with a boy; regardless, responsible for her care despite not being her legal guardian, and determined to find her, with Janna in tow.
Lensed by DP M.I. Littin-Menz, writer and director Shahad Ameen’s possesses an almost ethereal atmosphere; dense, swirling fog and dust follow the women on their journey, situating them deeper in the liminal spaces they inhabit. It’s mesmerizing, and still— at times a bit too still. The slow pacing undercuts Hijira’s urgency, not only regarding the immediate search for Sarah, but also the film’s wider portrait of the oppression Saudi women face, across generations, the present conflict raising issues from the past. Along the way, for instance, Sitti and Janna stop to visit the cemetery where Sitti’s father is buried. They’re berated and kicked out— women aren’t permitted beyond the cemetery’s walls. Sarah’s fate for even the most minor transgression is far worse.
Hijira picks up, however, when Sitti and Janna join up with an unscrupulous salesman, Ahmad (Nawaf Al Dhufairi), who promises to drive them to where they believe Sarah may be. He’s the sort who bottles up regular water and sells it to the unsuspecting as sacred water, but he’s also a lively foil to Sitti and Janna, playing road games with her and drawing out the girl who always has her headphones on and whose timid demeanor suggest uncertainty of her place in a world not built for her until she gains some agency. But really, so much of Hijira benefits from the quiet strength of Nazmi’s performance as Sitti straddles the line between what is right, and what is expected.
In the waning days of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dictatorship over Romania in 1989, a child goes missing. Ten-year-old Maria’s (Emma Ioana Mogoş) sister leaves to take out the trash, and never comes back; Maria is the last one to see her in person. Writer and director Mihai Mincan’s Milk Teeth unfolds over the following year, but time is difficult to grasp for Maria and her family as the investigation continually starts and stalls in step with the morphing political backdrop, its passage marked by a soundscape that leans heavily on the staccato ticking of a clock, the ponderous thumping of a heart.
Marina Palii, playing Maria’s mother Cezaria, is a pillar of quiet desperation; it’s hard to take your eyes off her in every scene she’s in. But Milk Teeth— the title referring to the baby teeth every child eventually loses— keeps the parents and other adults largely on the periphery, opting to watch the aftermath of the incident unfold through the eyes of Maria instead. Even when the adults are speaking, the camera centers on her, and all the doubt and sadness that comes with being the kid who was left behind can be read in Mogos’ remarkable mature features.
Milk Teeth is also an intricately designed film; DP George Chiper-Lillemark’s textured photography lends a sense of childlike wonder that’s at odds with the film’s mature subject matter, a perfect visual encapsulation of the liminal space Maria inhabits. The film’s surreal touches— knocking on walls, a haunting descent into a dark factory, the sort of neverending chase that you experience in your dreams, where whether you’re running from something or to something is never entirely clear— dare the viewer to make their own interpretations. Perhaps too much. Stretches of Milk Teeth verge on indecipherable, rendering the viewing experience rather trying. But the devastation of not only loss, but not knowing, pierces through all of that.
Katie at the Movies 