Peter Mullan didn't set out to create a controversy with his second
feature, but he's quite prepared to live with the consequences. Set in
Ireland during the 1960s, The Magdalene Sisters is a fiction. But
it's based on the real-life case of the Magdalene asylums, set up in
the 19th century and run by an order of Catholic nuns known, ironically
enough, as the Sisters of Mercy.
If recent accounts are to be believed, merciful is the last thing the nuns were. The evidence against them is mounting: a book entitled Do Penance or Perish by Dr Frances Finnegan, published in 2001; Steve Humphries' 23-minute documentary Sex in a Cold Climate, made in 1997 for Channel 4 in the UK; and a host of testimonials by some of the 30,000 or more women who were incarcerated in the asylums. To that list we can now add Mullan's film, an all-stops-out melodrama in which the nuns are the villains and the women placed in their care the victims.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/11/1049567864338.html
If recent accounts are to be believed, merciful is the last thing the nuns were. The evidence against them is mounting: a book entitled Do Penance or Perish by Dr Frances Finnegan, published in 2001; Steve Humphries' 23-minute documentary Sex in a Cold Climate, made in 1997 for Channel 4 in the UK; and a host of testimonials by some of the 30,000 or more women who were incarcerated in the asylums. To that list we can now add Mullan's film, an all-stops-out melodrama in which the nuns are the villains and the women placed in their care the victims.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/11/1049567864338.html
