"Amanece en Calcuta" is a documentary that revolves around the person of Teresa of Calcutta, passing the microphone to people who at some point have been close to her or have been influenced by her. It has a clear testimonial vocation and is an audiovisual piece that transpires love.
It is a work treated with sobriety, which lets the interviewees unfold in front of the camera, telling a story with the strength of being a lived event.
The work is a film open to all audiences, with a vocation to stir and appeal to everyone. Above all, it is a story of divine grace, which fills with plenitude an audience that can easily understand and empathize with those characters who are the protagonists of the film. Among them, we find a priest who survived his illness through the mediation of the Virgin Mary; a professional athlete in search of the meaning of her suffering; a university professor of philosophy who finds God in everyday acts; a nurse at an abortion clinic; a convert from a mostly Buddhist country who finds the path to the priesthood after meeting Mother Teresa on a plane; and a woman who tells us about the miraculous healing of her husband from brain cancer. All these testimonies have a revitalizing magnetism, which makes it inevitable to surrender to the film, and to aspire to a better world, where faith is not spoken but transmitted through deeds.
Jose María Zavala Chicharro (1962), a journalist by profession and a writer converted to cinema, has a small but well cared for film biography, all of it with a religious theme.
Thus, after several films on Padre Pio, and one on Pope St. John Paul II, he arrives at the cinema with this authorial project, which he treats with an affection that is evident on the screen. His training as a journalist ignites with fluency the documentary genre, and his passion for beauty makes the work an experience full of restlessness and strength. Beyond an omnipresent music, he has a careful and refined journalistic style, which makes the film flow with simplicity and good taste.
