Cillian Murphy on Exploring the ‘Collective Trauma’ of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries in New Film ‘Small Things Like These’: ‘Art Can Be a Really Useful Balm’

variety.com:

Ellise Shafer During the Berlin Film Festival press conference for his newest film “Small Things Like These,” Cillian Murphy reflected on the “collective trauma” of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. “Small Things Like These” focuses on the “horrific asylums run by Roman Catholic institutions from the 1820s until 1996, ostensibly to reform ‘fallen young women,’” according to its synopsis.

The story is told through the eyes of Murphy’s devoted father and coal merchant Bill Furlong, who during Christmas 1985 “discovers startling secrets kept by the convent in his town, along with some shocking truths of his own,” as the film’s description states. “It was a collective trauma, particularly for people of a certain age, and I think that we’re still processing that,” Murphy said of the Magadelene Laundries. “I also think that art can be a really useful balm for that wound.

The book certainly was a huge seller in Ireland, it seems like everybody read it. I think the sort of irony of the book is it’s a Christian man trying to do a Christian act in a dysfunctional Christian society.

And it asks a lot of questions about complicity and silence and shame and all of those things, but I really don’t think the duty of art is to answer those questions, it’s to kind of provoke them.” “Small Things Like These” will open the Berlin Film Festival on Thursday night and is competing for the prestigious Golden Bear.