Product Description

A stirring, must-see motion picture critics called one of the best films of the year, THE MAGDALENE SISTERS is the triumphant story of three extraordinary women whose courage to defy a century of injustice would inspire a nation! Abandoned by society and cast out by their families for crimes they did not commit, these women found themselves stripped of their liberty and dignity and condemned to indefinite sentences of manual labor. Within the church-run Magdalene Laundries, these women were forced into unbearable institutional servitude in order to cleanse themselves of the "sins" of which they had been accused. From acclaimed director Peter Mullan, this award-winning powerhouse not only reveals the truth behind one of the great tragedies of our time, but celebrates the bravery that would bring it to an end!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26800 in DVD
• Brand: Disney
• Released on: 2004-03-23
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 119 minutes

Amazon.com
A movie guaranteed to make the blood boil, The Magdalene Sisters gives a lacerating account of life inside a Magdalene Laundry, one of the dismal asylums for "wayward women" run by the Catholic Church in Ireland. Director Peter Mullan, inspired by a TV documentary on the same subject, follows the miserable fates of three young women who are institutionalized in the 1960s for flimsy reasons; their lives are at the mercy of sadistic nuns (Geraldine McEwan is superb as the head of the place). The film sounds tortuous, but its rich sense of outrage and excellent performances--Nora-Jane Noone is a real discovery--make it consistently gripping. The movie won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and went on to become a box-office hit in Ireland, where the Magdalene system was still a fresh memory. It had been abolished only in 1996. --Robert Horton

From The New Yorker
A scalding new picture from Peter Mullan, set in Ireland in the nineteen-sixties. Three girls are sent to a Magdalene Asylum-one of a network of institutions to which wayward young women were consigned by their disapproving families. The asylums were run by Roman Catholic nuns; in this case, the presiding spirit is Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan), who counts her money in secret and speaks to her charges with a forked tongue. Finally, the trio of friends-played by Anne-Marie Duff, Dorothy Duffy, and Nora-Jane Noone-make their escape, as if from a prisoner-of-war camp. The system was certainly crushing, but it has inspired Mullan-a fine actor, whose previous film as director, "Orphans," was a scabrous Glaswegian comedy-to deliver his most intemperate work, which lashes out at the Catholic Church with the same hardness of heart that Sister Bridget and her colleagues display in their running of the asylum. You come away from the movie not just convinced but cowed.-A.L. (8/11/03) -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

WORDS ALONE CANNOT DESCRIBE THIS TRAGEDY!!!!!
I just finished watching this movie and I am extremely disturbed. The story is filled with so much hate and so much blatant bigotry that my hands are actually shaking as I sit here and type this. No movie has ever touched me as "The Magdalene Sisters" did.

First, let me just say that all the men in this movie are disgusting, repugnant COWARDS!! The men can do no wrong while the ladies have to sacrifice for no apparent reason. That is terribly unjust.

The Magdalene House is a jail-like home. It's run by pedophile priests that enjoy taking advantage of handicapped ladies and sadistic nuns that get personal pleasure out of abusing the ladies that live there.

The movie revolves around 3 young ladies that were sent to a Magdalene House; each for different reasons. One of the young ladies was raped, another was too pretty, and another had a child out of wedlock. What exactly was their crime that caused them to be locked up for years and years you might be asking? After all, they were being punished and told that they were good-for-nothing sinners! Their crime was: female sexuality! Apparently, the Catholic Church of Ireland found that to be the ultimate crime. And, as a result they punished these poor young ladies mercilessly.

There is only one shining light in this very evil movie. That is at the very end when two of the young ladies escape. They were courageous enough to get out and free themselves of all beatings, hate, and sexual abuse.

Thousands of women more were enslaved in these concentration camps until their pitiful deaths. Words along cannot describe this tragedy.

This movie is a true story which took place in Ireland. Thank you to Peter Mullen for making a movie about this topic.

Suffice It To Say, The Church and State Had Too Much Power.
"The Magdalene Sisters" is a fact-based account of three young Irish women who were imprisoned in a Magdalene Laundry in Dublin in 1964. The original purpose of the ten Magdalene Laundries that were established in Ireland in the 19th century was to reform prostitutes. Women were imprisoned by the State and Church and expected to do penance for their sins through hard work and prayer. By 1930, instead of being populated by former prostitutes, Ireland's Magdalene Laundries were occupied primarily by unwed mothers whose families had rejected them. An estimated 30,000 Irish women were detained in the Laundries during the 20th century, until the last one closed in 1996, and were used as a slave labor force, working from dawn until dusk to turn a profit for the Order that administered the Laundries.

"The Magdalene Sisters" tells the stories of Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), who is sent away from her home after being raped at a family wedding, Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), whose caretakers at the orphanage where she grew up banish her to the Laundry to prevent her good looks from causing any trouble, and Rose (Dorothy Duffy), who is scorned by her family after bearing a child out of wedlock. These three teenagers arrive at the Magdalene asylum at the same time and together bear its abuses and indignities over the course of years. The three lead actresses give fine performances. Geraldine McEwan and Eileen Walsh give stand-out performances as Sister Bridget, chief administrator of the asylum, and Crispina, a mentally challenged inmate, respectively. The film does portray the Irish Catholic Church in a bad light -at least the small part of it that we see. But the Church fares no worse than the government that supported the imprisonment of women who had committed no crime or, even more appalling, the self-righteous, hideously self-absorbed parents who delivered their children into imprisonment and slavery because they were afraid of what the neighbors would think. "The Magdalene Sisters" presents interesting intertwined stories about a very unfortunate slice of Irish history.

The DVD: This disc's single bonus feature is the inaptly titled 50-minute documentary "Sex in a Cold Climate". This is an original British documentary film which inspired writer/director Peter Mullan to write "The Magdalene Sisters". The documentary features the stories of three women who were confined in Magdalene Laundries in their youth, and one woman who grew up in an orphanage that adjoined one of the Laundries. It's unclear to me whether these women were the basis for the characters in the "The Magdalene Sisters" or not. Their stories are similar enough to those in the movie to make me think so, yet they differ in timing and details. For the feature film, subtitles are available in French and Spanish, and captions are available in English. Dubbing is available in French. Four unavoidable "public service" spots precede the film, narrated by movie stars and aimed at women with anorexia, alcoholism, self-esteem, and spousal abuse problems. What will we have to sit through next?

Another True and Shocking Story Of The Holy Catholic Church!
For much of the 20th century in Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church operated a string of laundries, the Magdalene Asylums, where very young women accused of "moral crimes" were sent
to work and repent of their evil ways in a cathartic vision of cleansing the soul while cleaning the laundry. These so-called "moral crimes" were broadly defined as becoming pregnant, getting
raped or even flirting with boys or being overly attractive and thus committing the sin of vanity.

In the asylum's history, over 30,000 women were incarcerated, endured the Catholic Churches discipline systems and many died there. Often sexually abused and assaulted by priests, sexually humiliated, assaulted, shamed and beaten within an inch of their lives by their masochistic caretakers, the nuns - those "sweet sisters of mercy".

As a shocker, The last of these horrendous Catholic laundries closed in 1996.
Scottish actor-writer-director Peter Mullan sets the story in 1964, the high-water mark for tension between our modern society and old-line Catholicism.

The story centers on three very young women who were surreptitiously marched off to repent and be slaves for life to the Holy Catholic Church and their "pious" service of community.
Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is raped by her cousin at a family wedding and both of her parents place her in the "care" of their village priest and ship her off to the Magelene Laundries to avoid that horrible stigma of shameful family embarrassment; Rose (Dorothy Duffy) is an unwed mother forced by her mother, father and Holy Father to give her baby boy up for adoption, placing him in the Catholic orphanage system, and Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) is a Catholic orphanage young and beautiful teenaged girl deemed loose just because she is so pretty, fun and talks to boys.
All three are sent to a Magdalene laundry outside Dublin, where conditions would make the dusty prison farm in "Cool Hand Luke" look like a virtual health spa. These young women are worked 12 to 14 hours a day, 364 days a year (except Christmas, God bless) without any pay, viciously beaten for even speaking out of turn and, in one most disturbing scene, trotted around naked and ridiculed by the nuns.

Overseeing the place is Highhanded Sister Bridget, a witch in a wimpole, well played by the British veteran Geraldine MacEwan.

The other inmates of the Holy Catholic Church are a varied lot. The tragic figure of the mentally disabled, sexually assaulted, and committed Crispina played by Eileen Walsh in an earth shattering performance really stands out as the best performance in the cast, in my humble opinion.

The nuns are given some depth by director, Mullan- Sister Bridget is shown as a whirling devilish mean mother superior one moment, but capable of gushing tears at a Christmas Day screening of "The Bells of St. Mary's."

What is truly unbelievable and disquieting in "The Magdalene Sisters" is how the Irish families of the prisoners aided and abetted such cruel treatment of their own flesh and blood.

When one girl, Una, successfully escapes the laundry, she is beaten within an inch of her life and is dragged back by her father (oddly played by the director, Mullan), who verbally and physically abuses Una every step of the way. Una is handed over to Sister Bernadette and the sister shaves all of Una's beautiful hair off of her beaten and bloodied head which was a regular action taken by the nuns.

In Mullan's portrait of institutionalized shame and suffering, and a society's uniquely cruel form of sexual repression, "The Magdalene Sisters" is a hard pill to take, but certainly worth it for its outpouring of overcoming, raw rage and defiance on the screen.

And if the fact-based movie weren't enough to shock, also included is the British documentary "Sex In A Cold Climate" which interviews several Irish women who were imprisioned during the time of the Catholic Church's REIGN OF TERROR! The documentary exposes even more sick, sad and twisted goings on that the movie didn't even touch upon...

Highly Recommended and Happy Pondering!