Magdalenes at Toronto

The Magdalene Sisters director Peter Mullan talks to Mary Rose Doorly, who reviews the major Irish films at the Canadian Film Festival. [Extract]

Peter Mullan is gung ho. He's battling off his fire and brimstone dissenters with one hand and accepting accolades and awards with the other. What more could a filmmaker want than to have their latest movie in a huge public row because the Catholic church are full of condemnation while the critics are full of veneration? It's early afternoon in balmy Toronto and Mullan is drinking a beer in a leafy courtyard of the Intercontinental Hotel. As we speak, he has just received the Golden Lion at Venice for Best Film with the The Magdalene Sisters and will shortly be presented with the Discovery Award, a prize for first or second-time directors, voted on by the 750 journalists at the Toronto Film Festival.

The film, a stinging indictment of the treatment of young women in a 1960s Dublin laundry run by nuns, has been shunned by the church with the U.S based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights accusing Mullan of singling out Catholics for negative portrayal. The official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, brought its crozier down heavily on Mullan, describing him as a hypocrite and his film as an "angry and rancourous provocation that misrepresented religious leaders". Other headlines in Italian papers have accused Mullan of telling lies and stating that it was a scandal that he won the Golden Lion.

"I tell you what the scandal is", says a still smarting Mullan. "The scandal is that the church did this kind of thing to these women. Surely making a film like this is part of the process of the church's redemption? If only they had the courage to admit it. And surely they could have been a bit smarter about the whole thing? Their reaction has given the film front page coverage all over Italy which is great publicity no matter what way you look at it. At one of the Venice screenings a priest was videoing the people in the queue telling them that they were committing a sin by watching this film. Talk about medieval."

The full text of this article is printed in Film Ireland 89