Mullan's dissenting voice

Three years ago, actor Peter Mullan was in Italy holding a press conference for Orphans, his first film as director.

"I'd done 50 interviews and I was exhausted," he recalls. As everyone stood up to leave, there was one last question: what was his next project? Mullan started talking, with increasing excitement and animation, about a little-known modern scandal involving the near-slavery of thousands of women. The journalists drifted back into the room, astonished.

On Sunday, the director was back in Italy to accept the Golden Lion award for best film in Venice for the finished movie, The Magdalene Sisters. It was a popular win for a work universally admired by critics - including Alexander Walker, who reviewed it last week on these pages. A notable dissenting voice came from the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano. Its review attacked the film as an "angry and rancorous provocation...incautiously allowed to pass as a work of art".

The Church has good reason to be unhappy. Set in rural Ireland in 1964, The Magdalene Sisters depicts one of the Dickensian institutions run there by nuns for so-called "fallen women". An estimated 30,000 women were detained in them before the last was closed down as late as 1996.

"They were workhouses," Mullan explains. "You worked in the laundry where you could literally wash the stains off your soul. Conveniently, the Sisters of Mercy would provide you with the materials to do it from local hospitals and schools. They sold your labour and you never saw a penny. You were kept under lock and key, humiliated, abused, raped - often priests would see you as easy prey."

Mullan, 41, was inspired to make the film after seeing a Channel 4 documentary, Sex in a Cold Climate. "I was weeping at the end of it," he recalls. But there was also something much more emotional at stake: his personal memories of growing up in Glasgow's Catholic community. "My mother worked in Nazareth House, a children's home. There were things we knew about, things not right there, though

they've never been prosecuted. I remember as a kid the priest coming round the door, just to pull up any of us. That was a big deal, we were terrified, as were our parents. And this was a little Catholic enclave in a Protestant country. Imagine that in Ireland multiplied by 1,000 per cent. I asked one woman what it was like there up to about 15 years ago and she said, 'Well, imagine the KGB...'

"In what was then basically a theocratic state, it just took one guy to say to a priest, 'She's a tart, Father.' Before the girl knew it, her parents would be visited by that priest and, with no evidence, she would be locked up for between three and 45 years.

"They found a mass grave in Dublin. Three hundred bodies, unnamed. They weren't murdered, they just died of old age. What kind of sick people would do that? I know great priests and great nuns, but it does not excuse the hundreds who were in there for power, sadism and sexual gratification."

Geraldine McEwan's performance in The Magdalene Sisters as a cruel nun was praised by critics for its subtlety, but Mullan has no interest in illuminating the Church's motives. "I'm sure there is a really good story to be told as to why the nuns did it. Personally, at the moment I don't care. The Catholic Church is a very rich organisation. If they want to make that movie, fine. They can afford it."