A film dealing with the experiences of women in Ireland's Magdalene laundries has won the best picture award at the Venice Film Festival. It was announced yesterday that The Magdalene Sisters, directed by Peter Mullan and set in a Dublin convent between 1964 and 1968 was the winner of this year's Golden Lion Award.
The film had its world premiere in Venice on August 30th and will be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival next Thursday. It then goes to the New York Film Festival later this month, where just two dozen films are invited to be shown each year.
Indeed The Magdalene Sisters is the only film invited to be shown at all three major film festivals this year. It will open the Cork Film Festival on October 6th and will go on release in Ireland on October 25th, with a 15 PG certificate.
It has been described by this newspaper's film critic Michael Dwyer as "a tough, emotionally loaded and deeply unsettling drama made with classically simple cinematic skill by Peter Mullan, the Scottish actor who won the best actor award at Cannes in 1998 for Ken Loach's film, My Name Is Joe, and whose many notable acting credits also include Riff-Raff, Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and The Claim.
The Magdalene Sisters is set entirely in Ireland, but was filmed in Scotland where a convent in Dumfries doubled as the Dublin institution at the film's centre.
It begins with the four main characters being introduced to life in the convent by the superior Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan) who explains how they will atone for their sins and be saved from eternal damnation by a regimented life of work and prayer. She explains that the institution is named after Mary Magdalene, traditionally believed to have been a former prostitute who repented before Christ and washed his feet.
One of the most effective elements of the film is its refusal to sentimentalise the fate of its characters or to depict the nuns as stock villains. Instead it is said to present the nuns as women who are just as institutionalised as their charges. It ends with a caption saying that as many as 30,000 women were detained at Magdalene institutions before the last one closed in 1996.
