Testimony

“Banished babies is what we called ourselves” – a tough watch about fighting back for justice

Testimony is based on the real-life stories of women in the last century labelled as “morally impure” (usually unmarried mothers) and who survived horrific abuse in the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland.

The documentary opens with its mission statement of how, from 1922 to 1996, the Irish state and Catholic Church imprisoned many women in institutions all over the country, and made them work (without pay) in the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes.

The doc then looks at the 21st-century efforts of the advocacy group Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) to bring their stories to light and “put the State in the dock” as one survivor accurately puts it. The JFM are assisted by many people, including a young trainee barrister called Maeve.

Testimony looks at the interviewees, now articulate women around retirement age and referred to mainly by their first names only, who talk about the stories of the hidden abuse they suffered at the laundries. One refers to their group of survivors as “banished babies” to describe their earliest days.

Another interviewee, simply identified as “Mary”, speaks about her early life, saying: “I resisted dying and resisted it to this day…”. She recounts how she was fostered and then “incarcerated in an industrial school” and was told (untruthfully) that her mother was dead.

Along with the JFM news conferences of their outspoken attempts to bring justice to the women, the documentary Testimony uses black-and-white footage of publicity footage shot by a religious Father, depicting a warm family atmosphere of welcoming, cheerful nuns. This footage, of course, clashes sharply with the survivors’ accounts of what actually happened.

The documentary is professionally and vividly brought to life, with reenactments of the survivors’ tales, which are done without showing anything explicit other than just a hazy blurring over of the abuse. There are also home videos of the survivors as adults breaking into abandoned “building sites” to see their former “homes” or rather laundries.

Other survivors speak of abuse, including being restrained, having all their hair cut off against their will, being imprisoned in their room at night, asking in despair: “Did they get a kick out of locking us up?” and having their names forcibly changed. One simply says: “I’d been trafficked and kidnapped.”

One elderly woman talks of her teenage years at the Magdalene and the institutionalised abuse she suffered there, saying with a remarkable lack of bitterness: “It was supposed to be a house of refuge...it’s left its mark.” She mentions her escape as a child, saying she ran out during a rainstorm to ensure she couldn’t be followed, as her footprints would hopefully be washed away in the rain.

The harrowing testimony involves tales of rape, beatings, humiliations, and nightmares suffered as children at the hands of the adults supposed to look after them. The horror stories include the huge pressure on unmarried mothers to give up their children and accounts of mothers looking for their children’s graves but not knowing where they were buried.

One survivor who had a son she’d been forced to hand over to the authorities in the past recounts how she was told: “You ought to be grateful he’s gone to a good Catholic home in America.” There’s footage of the related newspaper story from 1956, headlined: “Tiny Irish orphan brings joy to couple…”. This is chillingly inaccurate, as of course as the child was not an orphan.

There is no shortage of films based on the religious persecution of the last century in the UK. This occurs in the Irish horror mockumentary The Devil’s Doorway (2018), a fictitious look at the nightmares visited on these “unwed mothers”, as a film crew attempts to find out what happened in one of the laundries. Another example is the trippy nightmare of some 20-something Americans in Shrooms (2007), where the happy-go-lucky tourists visit a remote part of Ireland to suddenly find themselves trapped in a nightmarish children’s home. Here, they relive the horrors of an abusive childhood, which the children suffered in the supposed protection of a religious group.

Testimony is the reality behind the nightmares these works of fiction are based on, and this makes it the proverbial “tough watch”. It can’t be done justice in a film review, and is also one of those films that may need, in the best possible way, more than one attempt to see. But it’s a story that needs to be told, however difficult to hear. The survivors’ story of forgiveness is inspiring and along with the warmth and compassion they received from their families and communities. One survivor simply says of this support: “That was my healing”, and this one sentence makes a true-life horror slightly easier to watch, as the docu compassionately covers the story of the former “banished babies” and how they fought for justice.

TESTIMONY will be in UK and Irish Cinemas from 21st November with the support of the BFI, awarding National Lottery funding.