Cynematik • Cyndi Greening

This series on HBO is still the most entertaining look at filmmaking. Directors Kyle and Efram bumble their way through The Battle of Shaker Heights, a coming of age film written by Erica Beeney. The message boards on the PGL site alternate between savaging the participants and glorifying them. It’s great human drama.

The Magdalene Sisters is an exciting new film from Miramax. I was working on a similar script about six years ago about fallen Roman Catholic girls in Ireland and their illegitimate children. Ireland had no form of welfare until very recently so daughters were at the mercy of their parents when they strayed from narrow path.

According to the New York Times movie review, these “bad girls” exiled from their families and communities, often after becoming pregnant out of wedlock, were forced to do slave labor in convent laundries that proliferated in Ireland until recently. The existence of these religious labor camps run by the Sisters of the Magdalene Order came to light only in the 1970’s with the discovery of the unmarked graves of women who lived there. After the scandal broke, the laundries were closed, the last in 1996. Some 30,000 women are thought to have passed through their gates. Go the Movie Trailers at Apple to see this and other movie trailers. Bookmark it!