Sister Act

After widespread acclaim at the Venice Film Festival - and a Golden Lion award for best film - Peter Mullan's distressing look at theocratic persecution and abuse took a beating from the Catholic church and received an official censure from the Vatican. Presenting The Magdalene Sisters at the London Film Festival, Mullan is still in awe of the sheer scale of Vatican disapproval, even to the extent of consigning to hell all who watch the film. "I wasn't expecting anything as severe. I was really amazed. I mean, they put us on the front page in Italy for a fortnight," he told us. "I can only imagine that the Vatican PR people just thought 'fuck it, we're going to go in with all guns blasting.' They were telling people that even by watching the film they were committing a mortal sin. I mean, holy shit, it's 2002 and they're using medieval tactics." The film focuses on one of the Magdalene laundries, Catholic correctional facilities where young women were sent if they were deemed to have strayed from Ireland's strongly enforced Catholic doctrine. The Magdalene Sisters follows the ill fate of three such women, sent away for conceiving a child out of wedlock, being raped and looking at boys in an unwholesome manner, respectively. Once inside, the women are routinely abused mentally, physically and sexually, forced to work as slave labour and utterly dehumanised by an institution sanctioned by church and state. First learning of the laundries through a documentary, Mullan immediately set to work on the script, so that these injustices against Catholic women could be known. "I was stunned when I saw it, then, towards the end, I started crying like a baby. The next day I started making notes on the film and I structured it in a day and a half. I was so angry, just thinking, 'how could you do this to people? To my people, to practising Catholics?' I just wanted to get it out there, in drama, as opposed to documentary. With drama you don't have to be constrained by impartiality, we can look at the subject and universalise it in a way that a documentary can't." Despite condemnation from the Catholic church, Mullan stands by his film and is pleased to see that critics and audiences alike have both praised it and decided to see it despite any risks to their immortal soul. " We've been number one in Italy and now we're number one in Ireland, the two most Catholic countries in Europe. Quite rightly, practising Catholics are not listening to the remit issued by the Vatican, they're making up their own minds. They understand that this is a film about Catholic victims. For the Catholic Church to have the audacity to suggest that this is an anti-Catholic film is absurd. No guys, the victims were Catholics, you were supposed to be helping us, you were supposed to be looking after us, but it never happened."