Real life horror story behind new Cillian Murphy film produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck
Oppenheimer and Peaky Blinders star Cillian Murphy will return to his Irish roots for his next cinematic outing.
And it's a motion picture with an extremely disturbing back story that is all too real for those who lived through it.
Murphy's new flick is titled Small Things Like These.
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It's based off of the book of the same name, written by Irish author Claire Keegan.
It's a project that has attracted some big names behind the camera as well as on it, with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon teaming up once again to co-produce.
Starring opposite Murphy in the lead role as Bill Furlong will be Emily Watson (War Horse, The Theory of Everything, Chernobyl) and Michelle Fairley (Game of Thrones).
The synopsis for the book is as follows: "It is 1985 in a small Irish town.
"During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season.
"Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church."
What Bill comes across is the grim truth of Ireland's Magdalen laundries, something the film synopsis describes as 'horrific asylums' run by Roman Catholic institutions from the 1820s until 1996, with an illusion set around reforming 'fallen young women'.
Also known as asylums, the Magdalen laundries saw thousands of women confined within these institutions across Ireland.
The 'fallen women' that the asylums prayed upon were primarily unmarried mothers and their daughters, women who were ‘promiscuous’ in their ways, and those in the care of Roman Catholic church orders.
The institutions were run by the orders for a profit, with them very much a modern form of slave labour.
According to the Justice for Magdelenes Research, 'at least 10,000 girls and women were imprisoned, forced to carry out unpaid labour and subjected to severe psychological and physical maltreatment'.
In 2013, a formal apology was issued by the Irish state.
A compensation scheme was established for survivors which by 2022 - and after an extension of the scheme - had paid out €32.8 million to 814 survivors.
The novel off of which the film is based was published in 2021 to widespread critical acclaim with one review labelling it as a 'stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity'.
In 2022, it book won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Small Things Like These will debut at the Berlin Film Festival on 15 February.
Topics: Cillian Murphy, TV and Film, Ireland
Tom Earnshaw