Untold Secrets today, Saturday, 23rd October 2021, opened the Time of History section at the 66th Seminci, with the testimony of survivors and relatives about the abuses carried out by nuns during the first half of the 20th century in the Mother and Baby institution in Tuam, Ireland.
Director Teresa Lavina, who has come to Valladolid to present her film, expressed the controversy generated by this film which denounces the abandonment by the institutions of the victims: “Untold Secrets is censored in Ireland by all the newspapers.”
Untold Secrets is her second feature-length documentary as director, after The Audition (2017) and short films such as Still (2017), The Innermost (2018) and Bad Fruit: The Unheard Voice of the Tuam Babies (2019), this last work dealing with the same subject as the documentary released this Saturday.
Some of the testimonies collected in the documentary are from children and mothers who passed through the convent of Saint Mary’s Bon Secours Sisters. One of them, Anne Silke, to whose memory the film is dedicated, grew up in the convent and later, like many children, was fostered out as labour. Her Foster family was a well-known Irish political family at the time. It also features the testimony of the writer of “Republic of Shame: Stories from Ireland’s Institutions for Fallen Women,” Caelainn Hogan.
Untold Secrets screens this Saturday 23rd October at 4pm at the Fundos Hall and on Sunday 24th October at 7.15pm at Broadway Cinemas.
