Film review: Stolen is a difficult but essential confrontation of the Mother and Baby Homes

Adele Johnston, a contributor to Stolen.

• Stolen 
• ★★★★★
• Cinema release

Stolen (15A) is a documentary by Margo Harkin that opens with the horrific revelations about the Tuam Mother and Baby Home that first surfaced in 2014, when the work of local historian Catherine Corless revealed that 796 babies had been buried in a mass grave. 

The documentary quickly expands, however, to incorporate all manner of ‘institutions of confinement’ for women, on both sides of the Border, and effectively becomes a history of how Irish women were treated in an Ireland heavily influenced by the Catholic Church.

Harkin even provides a theory as to why it all happened — a new State, relatively powerless on the international stage, turned inwards to exert the semblance of control on its most defenceless — but for the most part Stolen is a blood-boiling account of illegal incarceration, physical and psychological abuse, human trafficking and, of course, all those unnecessary deaths, many of which, heartbreakingly, appear to have been the result of malnutrition.

It’s a story that wouldn’t seem out of place were it being told of Stalin’s Russia, and Harkin’s matter-of-fact storytelling only serves to emphasise the horror of what unfolds as a variety of survivors, or survivors’ children, bear witness.

The brutally stark statistics are leavened in places by poetry recitals, or art installations, but these brief digressions simply throw the awful darkness into clearer relief. It’s a difficult and frequently triggering watch, certainly, but Stolen is must-see viewing.