Mother Teresa begins like an art film version of the six o'clock news. Grainy images follow one another in slow motion: sick children, soldiers with machine guns, emaciated bodies lying in the street. Then a white-clad figure appears on the screen and Richard Attenborough's narration begins: "There's a light in this world, a healing spirit more powerful than any darkness we may encounter..."

The life-affirming power of this two-minute sequence encapsulates the work of both the Nobel Peace Prize winner-and the filmmaker who chose her as a subject. "My goal is always to find the positive in the negative," says Ann Petrie, sipping a glass of echinacea-tinted water. It's the first weekend in May and, despite the last traces of spring flu, the New York-based documentary filmmaker has traveled a thousand miles to be part of the 1996 Fairfield Film Festival.

Her reward came last night when Mother Teresa received a standing ovation from an audience of several hundred. "You're quite an extraordinary group of people," she commented. "I could say things tonight that I can't normally say." Now, sitting on a bench outside the theater, Petrie reflects on her experiences with Mother Teresa and her own ongoing commitment to "making the good news interesting."

After two Emmys, an American Video Award, and screenings at the world's top film festivals, it is surprising to hear Mother Teresa described as a risky career move. Yet Petrie says the project marked a "tremendous departure" for the journalism world.

Petrie's own career had traditional beginnings. As a young writer for a New York City news station, she reported the crimes and calamities that impacted hundreds of lives every day. After some time, she says, she began to question the shortage of positive news stories that came across her editor's desk. "There's a part of human nature that likes to look at other people's problems," she says. "That's what soap operas are. But there's a chord in people that is strong as the other: a side that wants to be inspired, to see stories that elevate life."

Petrie began to look for subjects that would satisfy this other side of human nature. Before long, she was creating pieces about teachers, health care leaders, and everyday citizens who were making a difference in their own communities. "It was a real challenge to work from this other point of view," Petrie says, "to do it without being sentimental and create something as entertaining as possible."

It was this search for ever-more interesting material that led Petrie to Mother Teresa. "I was looking for ordinary people who had responded to situations in extraordinary ways. Mother Teresa was like the queen of them all."

According to Petrie, Mother Teresa did her best at first to discourage the making of the film. "She was suspicious as to whether a filmmaker could tell the truth about her work," Petrie recalls, "and she always disliked being singled out for her individual personality."

Petrie was not easily dissuaded. Along with her sister Jeanette, she spent two years volunteering for Mother Teresa's causes, caring for the homeless alongside nuns in New York City. Finally, Mother Teresa consented, and the Petrie sisters began their long-awaited project.

For the next five years, they followed the nun through 10 different countries on four continents, filming her work in war-torn areas and urban ghettoes. The resulting film was the Petrie sisters' attempt to capture the human transformations they had seen firsthand, both in others and in themselves.

Petrie recalls a particularly intense section of the filming when she and Jeannette crossed military lines to enter war-torn Beirut. "I became very conscious of the insanity of war," Petrie says. "Those people were all brothers, all Semitic. All the soldiers looked the same to me; I couldn't tell the difference between Israeli and Lebanese. Yet none of them had the courage to forgive or ask for forgiveness. Both must be done. That was Mother Teresa's big lesson in Beirut."

Equally powerful were scenes from Mother Teresa's center in The Bronx. The film contrasts the Sisterhood's work in New York with its undertakings in Calcutta. "Mother Teresa always said that the challenge in the West was inner poverty," Petrie says, "not just material lack, but loneliness, poverty of the soul."

This point comes across clearly in the film, and Petrie summarizes it by referring to one strong image. "There was a ragged bag lady who was brought in as a bundle of filth," she says. "A little Sister from Italy took her into the bath, and the old lady came out glistening, shampooed and washed clean with a nice nightgown on. The Sister was a beautiful young woman who had been a medical student, and now she was on her knees cutting this woman's toenails. It was as though she had the greatest king or queen in her care. That old lady knew it. She sparkled."

One moment Petrie could not capture on film was a personal epiphany she had while working with the nun. During the busiest period of the filming, Mother Teresa removed Petrie's sunglasses one afternoon, looked into her eyes, and told her to get more sleep. The impact of that simple gesture transformed Petrie's whole feeling about life. "Just in that one moment," says Petrie, "I suddenly realized, 'There is a God!' There are no words to describe experiences like that, but you know all the love that you look for in friends and parents and lovers and you never quite get? Well, I got it! And I could see in that moment that it has nothing to do with other people. They can be conduits, but we have the capability of generating it ourselves."

This, Petrie says, is the significance of the film's most powerful scene-an episode where one of Mother Teresa's nuns helps a Lebanese child come out of a seizure. The boy gazes into the Sister's eyes with a look of wonder and adoration as though he, like Petrie, had realized his own value for the very first time. "That little child was mentally retarded and crippled and seemed to have no purpose whatsoever in the world," she says, "and yet a huge amount of effort was expended to save his life. That is Mother Teresa's message: Every creature has a soul, a spark of divinity."

The insights Petrie gained while filming Mother Teresa continue to influence her work. The theme of "universal royalty" features strongly in her latest project, a television series with scholars Robert Bly and Marianne Woodman. "Bly and Woodman use myths and fairy stories as guidelines," she says, "showing you how to confront the monsters and the obstacles. These stories create archetypes that every human being, regardless of culture or race, can relate to. We're all princes and princesses."

It is for this same reason that the first moments of Mother Teresa depict the nun dressed all in white with her back to the camera. "She is almost anonymous, like a symbol for something," Petrie says. "There's just that shape on the screen. Because in the end, it's not Mother Teresa that's important. It's human life. She's nothing more than a channel for that."