Philomena

This is a deeply moving film about an investigation by a journalist, slightly lost at mid-point in his career, taken up as something to do. He assists a seventy-year-old woman, Philomena, in looking for the child who was forcefully taken from her when she was forced to live and work in a convent after becoming pregnant fifty years earlier. Everyone involved in this film emerges with a huge amount of credit (apart from organised religion). It is based on real events, and the journalist was Martin Sixsmith, one time BBC Russian correspondent and subsequently Tony Blair's director of communications. She is played by Judy Dench. The film is directed by Stephen Frears.

Judy Dench plays the part of an unsophisticated Irish woman excellently, and Steve Coogan, who co-wrote the screenplay, plays the part of Sixsmith modestly and well. The film moves between Ireland, where Philomena was incarcerated, and the United States, where her son was taken and lived his life before dying of AIDS. In the course of the film we discover that the convent was actively removing the children from their mothers and selling them to Americans for $1000; that the mothers were forced to work and could leave the convent only by paying £100; that the convent initially refused Pholomena any help in her search despite her son being buried in its grounds; that the convent lied about the availability of papers that would have been helpful, pretending that there had been a fire; that those in the convent believed that Philomena's unhappiness was the penance she should pay for having yielded to the power of sex. Sixsmith progresses from mild interest in Philomena's plight to anger as they uncover the terrible history of injustice and becomes more angry than Philomena, who remains unshaken in her Catholic faith.