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Director
Aisling Walsh
Credits
Producers: Dominic Wright, John McDonnell. Writers: Aisling Walsh, Kevin Byron Murphy, Patrick Galvin
Principal Cast
Aidan Quinn, Iain Glen, Marc Warren, John Travers
Category
FeatureF-Rated
The brutality of Ireland’s industrial schools has become a matter of public knowledge – and shame – over the last twenty years and Song for a Raggy Boy is part of that narrative of revelation. This film from Aisling Walsh revolves around the efforts of Franklin (Aidan Quinn), a one-time revolutionary hired to be a lay teacher at a reform school. Here he is shocked by the school’s culture of brutality; led by the cruel Brother John (Iain Glen), the boys at the school are subject to a regime of torture and degradation. Made to answer to numbers instead of names, the worst horror the boys are exposed to is a paedophile willingly accommodated by the staff. Based on Patrick Galvin’s memoir which recounted his time in an industrial school, Song for a Raggy Boy is a powerful depiction of the worst elements of Ireland’s religious institutions.
100 minutes, Ireland/UK/Denmark/Spain, 2003, Colour
AMÉLIE (25th ANNIVERSARY) 15.45
FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER 13.25
HOKUM 11.05, 18.15
ONCE UPON A TIME IN A CINEMA 20.10
PRIMAVERA 11.00, 20.35
ROSE OF NEVADA 20.20
THE STRANGER 13.05
THIS MORTAL COIL: ANXIETY + DEATH & TRANSFIGURATION 15.40
TRAD 13.20, 18.20
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