The Mission: Faith, Sacrifice and the Price of Doing What Is Right

Roland Joffé’s The Mission, starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons, remains one of the most visually magnificent and morally complex historical dramas in modern cinema. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival and nominated for seven Academy Awards, the film followed Joffé’s extraordinary debut The Killing Fields and earned him his second Oscar nomination for Best Director. Four decades later, its exploration of conscience, sacrifice, resistance and the value of human life offers a fascinating perspective on Joffé’s attachment to Irena’s Children, the forthcoming historical drama based on the extraordinary true story of Irena Sendler and the rescue of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.

Released only two years after The Killing Fields, The Mission confirmed that Roland Joffé’s fascination with history was inseparable from a deeper fascination with human morality. Set in 18th-century South America, the film follows Jesuit missionaries attempting to protect the Indigenous Guaraní people as European political interests threaten their communities. At its center are two radically different men, Father Gabriel, played by Jeremy Irons, and Rodrigo Mendoza, played by Robert De Niro, whose responses to injustice ultimately force the audience to confront a question for which the film deliberately provides no comfortable answer: when innocent lives are threatened by overwhelming power, what does doing the right thing actually require?

That question reaches far beyond the colonial world depicted in The Mission. It appears repeatedly throughout Joffé’s most celebrated work and finds an extraordinary real-life expression in the story of Irena Sendler, who faced her own seemingly impossible choice in Nazi-occupied Poland. Examining The Mission today therefore reveals something more than the legacy of an acclaimed film; it illuminates the moral territory Joffé has spent much of his career exploring and helps explain why Irena’s Children represents such a compelling continuation of it.