SecretlyBitten

I don't know if it's just Americans (and I am one) that are confusing this show with the "Great British Bake Off" but I don't think I am as this is something different. GBBO uses amateurs and this show, as the name implies, has professionals competing. It's true we don't see much baking per se, but we do see a lot of assembling of elements and then construction of masterpieces....if they work. I'm fine with all the hosts and am not easily offended as some others were. I watch this on a British tv streaming app which allows me to see it when it's being broadcast and I am able to see current episodes which I love.

This is a film about a man in the mid 1980's (not early 1900's as one reviewer thought) and the ongoing abuse by nuns in the Irish Catholic laundries, specifically one that is on his route as a seller of coal, etc.

In reality, girls who became pregnant (although no punishment or imprisonment for the boys because, as we know, the weight and morality of the world rests on women's shoulders) were forcibly put into these laundries to do essentially slave labor, cleaning clothes, until they had the baby and usually the baby was given away to a couple looking to adopt. Often the mother had no idea where her child ended up. Many of the women who were nuns in these laundries were absolutely horrible. They inflicted both physical and emotional abuse on these young women all in the name of being a "good Catholic" One of the best films showing this was The Magdalene Sisters, which has the actress, Eileen Walsh, who plays CM's wife in this film, as a bit of a slow witted girl, who is not only abused by the nuns, but sexually abused by a priest. Her performance is one I'll never forget.

So I have seen a few films on this subject and while I know that not all the nuns in laundries were cruel and abusive, the fact that some were and nothing was done about it infuriates me. It's people who ruin religion, not religion itself.

The story moves slowly and I've seen complaints about that in other reviews. I've also noticed that people don't seem to understand that a film's story is telling what happened from a few different viewpoints. It's not saying that it was like this everywhere for everyone. I see this attitude a great deal on social media when it comes to one person expressing an opinion and the response is usually an outburst of "it wasn't like this for me (or my Mother or friend, you get the picture.) But the lesser scored reviewers don't seem to understand that life is made up of individual stories that become part of the collective of the human experience. That is what this tale is about, a moment in time for this man and what he experienced.