The Magdalene Sisters

The Magdalene Sisters was Peter Mullan's second feature as writer-director, following Orphans (1998), and arrived three years after his Best Actor prize at Cannes for Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe. A UK–Ireland co-production, it premiered in competition at Venice in 2002 and won the Golden Lion, the festival's top prize. Mullan has said the project grew out of Sex in a Cold Climate, Steve Humphries' 1998 Channel 4 documentary built on the testimony of women who had passed through the Magdalene laundries.

The film opens in Dublin in 1964, where three young women are committed to a Magdalene asylum run by Catholic nuns: Margaret, after an assault at a family wedding; Rose, for giving birth outside marriage; and Bernadette, an orphan judged too attractive for her own good. Anne-Marie Duff, Dorothy Duffy and Nora-Jane Noone play the three, with Eileen Walsh as the fragile Crispina and Geraldine McEwan as Sister Bridget, the superior whose composure makes her more frightening than any raised voice. Mullan shoots the laundry with a plain, unhurried realism, and Craig Armstrong's score is used sparingly.

The film was a critical success on both sides of the Atlantic, with a 91% Rotten Tomatoes score and an 83 on Metacritic, and it was condemned by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano on its release. Its larger legacy is civic: it brought the laundries, the last of which closed in 1996, to an international audience a decade before the Irish state's formal apology to survivors in 2013. It sits alongside Philomena and Small Things Like These as part of a sustained Irish reckoning on screen.