The Magdalene Laundries were never really a secret. The official McAleese Report into the institutions claimed that around 11,000 Irish women were held in these institutions after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. Aoife Kelleher’s documentary Testimony, released in UK and Irish cinemas this weekend, draws on newer research to make a convincing case that this is a serious underestimate. Either way, if upwards of ten thousand people know something it can’t be a secret. But it can be suppressed. It can be shut out of polite conversation, suffocated under a blanket of shame, never acknowledged, never validated. The victims of the Magdalene Laundries would have loved to tell their stories earlier, but nobody would listen. Now Kelleher is, and the results are devastating.
Testimony at first appears to have an episodic structure. Each speaker is introduced by a title card, they give their account and then the film moves on. Except this is sleight of hand. It lends the film the quality of an official inquiry, a more thorough one than these women actually received. It also stops the film becoming overwhelming; when a new speaker is introduced, there is at least a minute or two of them setting up their story before it dives back into the horror of it all. But Kelleher and her co-writer and producer Rachel Lysaght have done something ingenious. Each account, rather than being a new beginning for the film, takes the viewer further into the crimes and their cover-up.
There are some films that are hard to write about because they say everything that needs to be said about the subject. These are hell for critics, but are essential for viewers; Testimony is one of those films.
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And it was a cover-up, a cover-up whose scale would be simply unbelievable if the evidence wasn’t to hand. Testimony‘s account begins with the building of a road across formerly church-owned land, which uncovers a mass grave of women and children. The bones are simply moved somewhere else – as one of the interviewees notes, swept aside even in death. But it starts people wondering about how many of these burial sites are out there, and this is the question that brings the whole system down.
It’s a system that goes far beyond the Magdalene Laundries themselves. At its most all-encompassing, the adoption agencies were directed to seize the children of institutionalised women and sell them to families overseas. A woman recalls seeing her baby taken from her and, wanting it to have at least some connection to her, giving it some clothes; a nun then immediately handed the clothes back to her. It represents a program of cultural erasure, the kind of thing you normally only see in countries occupied by an invading army. It also makes you admire the interviewees even more, not just for living through this but for being able to break the silence the programme depended on.
There are some films that are hard to write about because they say everything that needs to be said about the subject. These are hell for critics, but are essential for viewers; Testimony is one of those films. As noted in the comments about the film’s structure, its artistry is unobtrusive but definitely present. The drone shots common to a lot of recent documentaries are infused with a new purpose here, their heavenly perspective seeming to query where God was in all of this. It’s not an easy film but it is a necessary one, necessary in ways films rarely are, and its ultimate success is that it does justice to its subjects.
TESTIMONY is in Cinemas in UK and Ireland from 21st November
