Among the many major studio DVD screeners I received in November as a NYFCO member, “Philomena” was a low priority item. I could not imagine why I would have picked this as a best film of 2013 based on the previews I had seen in the theaters. It starred Judi Dench as an elderly Irish woman named Philomena Lee trying to find a son she had put up for adoption 50 years earlier, aided by a British reporter covering her story.
Indeed, as the film started I identified completely with the reporter who told Philomena’s daughter who he meets at a cocktail party that he did not cover “human interest” stories. Also, he was going to be busy writing a history of Russia—my kind of guy. It is only after Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) sits down with Philomena and begins to flesh out her story do we discover that she was one of thousands of young women victimized by the Catholic Church in Ireland that turned them into virtual slaves in laundries run out of their convents, in her case a place called Roscrea. This was the plot of Peter Mullan’s 2003 “The Magdelene Sisters”, a film I never saw but had vivid memories of the reviews depicting a chamber of horrors. Roscrea was what they called a Magdalene Asylum, not a mental institution but what Americans would call a reformatory for Catholic girls. The crime was not robbery or auto theft but having an out of wedlock child, prostitution, or promiscuity. full: http://louisproyect.org/2013/12/24/philomena-the-magdelene-sisters/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
