Jan 24, 2014
Imagine being a single and pregnant woman in Ireland in the 1950s. Your family would likely disown you and leave you to raise your child alone. The only place that would open its doors to you were Catholic convents where nuns would help women through their pregnancies for free in exchange for the women giving them four years of manual labor and signing away their rights to their children forever.
It certainly would be a tough experience to give away your own baby for life, contractually bound never to track him or her down or interfere with the child's new life and family. But in a horribly tough situation, the nuns were at least there for those women when no one else was.
The current movie “Philomena” deals with these issues in a powerfully made fashion, and it is connecting with audiences ($25 million and counting – a solid haul for a small “artsy” film) and with critics and Oscar voters (including Best Actress and Best Picture nominations).
“Philomena” stars the legendary actress Judi Dench (nominated for a best Actress Oscar) and British comic Steve Coogan in the story of a woman named Philomena Lee, who enlisted the help of a disgraced British journalist named Martin Sixsmith in her quest to find out what became of the son she lost in the adoption system run by Irish Catholic nuns in the 1960s.