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August 24- August 31,2003 |
Unearthing the church's secret shame
Peter Mullan's controversial The Magdalene Sisters exposes abuses by Catholic nuns
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2003-08-10
Before Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last summer, the Vatican church issued a biting indictment through its newspaper, Osservatore Romano, calling the movie an "angry and rancorous provocation... The fact that the priest is a hypocrite... is written on his face and is like a mark that - the director seems to suggest - is cut into all priests," adding that the film was "incautiously allowed to pass as a work of art at the Venice festival."
You can imagine the outrage when the film ended up winning the coveted Golden Lion.
The Magdalene Sisters tells the story of four girls in Ireland who are sent to the Magdalene laundries where women accused of sexual sins (being raped, flirting with boys, and having a baby while unmarried) were banished to a lifetime of servitude during the 20th century. This is the Ireland where 30,000 women were imprisoned in Magdalene laundries, literally washing the country's dirty linen (clerical and lay), their babies taken for largely undocumented adoption by Catholic families at home and in the U.S., their exhausted bodies laid to final rest in unmarked graves, until the last of these church-run institutions closed in 1996. Set in 1964, the film follows Crispina (Eileen Walsh) and Rose (Dorothy Duffy) who both gave birth to children out of wedlock; orphaned Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) who tends to be very flirtatious with boys; and Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) whose offense was that she got raped by her cousin at a wedding and made the mistake of telling her family about it.
When the announcement came down that The Magdalene Sisters was handed the Venice festival's top honour, Italy's Catholic Church immediately issued a scathing statement. "This film does not tell the truth; it brings dishonour on the festival and risks disqualifying it," said Cardinal Tonini of the Vatican. "Considerations of aesthetic value alone are not enough. I'm amazed no one has posed the problem of historical accuracy."
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