Watch again: Cillian Murphy promotes 'Small Things Like These' at Berlin Film Festival

[@NormaLilia24]

The film was great piece of art. The emotions Cillian portrayed was masterful. I was not aware this was based on true history until the end of the film. Very well done to everyone 👏🏼👏🏼

[@djbillybopdjbillybop2817]

looking forward to this movie also here is one for you Eileen Walsh was also Brilliant in the Movie The Magdalene Sisters 2002

[@eimearinez]

It was filmed in my home town so looking forward to seeing it I’m sure it will be very upsetting!

[@Im_straight-t4d]

In the Irish mind, and in the minds of everyone else who has seen or read one of the many films, plays and books about the Magdalene laundries, these were horrific institutions brimming with violence and overseen by sadistic, pervy nuns. Yet the McAleese Report found not a single incident of sexual abuse by a nun in a Magdalene laundry. Not one. Also, the vast majority of its interviewees said they were never physically punished in the laundries. As one woman said, "It has shocked me to read in papers that we were beat and our heads shaved and that we were badly treated by the nuns… I was not touched by any nun and I never saw anyone touched." The small number of cases of corporal punishment reported to McAleese consisted of the kind of thing that happened in many normal schools in the 1960s, 70s and 80s: being caned on the legs or rapped on the knuckles. The authors of the McAleese Report, having like the rest of us imbibed the popular image of the Magdalene laundries as nun-run concentration camps, seem to have been taken aback by "the number of women who spoke positively about the nuns". And yet, despite the fact that the McAleese Report has utterly exploded the popular view of these laundries, some are wondering out loud if it was nonetheless legitimate and good to have produced so many embellished stories about evil nuns in recent years, as a way of highlighting the broader culture of abuse in the Catholic Church. As The Irish Times ponders: "Are factual inaccuracies in movies justified by role in highlighting issues?" The Times cites campaigners for justice who believe that "the role such [movies and books] played in highlighting the issue justified any artistic embellishment". A playwright told the paper that even if these portrayals of laundry life were exaggerated, they "served an important function at the time" - that is, to raise awareness about the problem of abuse in Catholic life more broadly. This sounds dangerously like a Noble Lie defence - the idea that it is okay to make things up, to spread fibs, if one is doing it in the service of some greater good. The idea of the "good lie", the lie which helps open people's eyes to the existence of wickedness, should be anathema to anyone who cares about getting history right and establishing the truth. Yet there seem to be many in Ireland who believe that telling "good lies" about the extent of abuse in Catholic institutions is an okay thing to do since it might prove cathartic for a nation allegedly in denial about its dark past. This isn't the first time that observers or artists have massively embellished the alleged evilness of the modern Catholic Church. In September 2010, The Independent casually reported that in America "over 10,000 children have come forward to say they were raped [by Catholic priests]". This wasn't true. For the period 1950 to 2002, 10,667 Americans have made allegations of sexual abuse against priests but the majority do not concern rape - they include other foul things, from verbal abuse through to fondling. When the Irish government published its Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in 2009, newspaper headlines declared "Thousands were raped in Irish reform schools" or "Thousands raped in Ireland's Christian Brothers schools". But actually, the commission heard allegations of 68 rapes, not thousands. That is a horrific number as it is; why embellish it? Anyone who points out that reports and depictions of abuse in Catholic institutions have been overblown, risks being denounced as an abuse apologist or a sinister whitewasher. When I pointed out a couple of years ago that The Independent was wrong to say 10,000 children were raped by American priests, I was accused by one humanist magazine of being "pedantic". So it's pedantic to point out that there is a difference between being verbally abused by a priest and raped by one? These days, anyone who insists on getting the facts straight about Catholic institutions is accused of being a pedant, someone annoyingly and peskily committed to historical accuracy, rather than to the grander goal of making the Catholic Church appear as rotten and warped as possible, regardless of the facts. Yet those of us, even atheists like me, who are genuinely interested in truth and justice should definitely be concerned that films and news reports may have left the public with the mistaken belief that women in Magdalene laundries were stripped and beaten, and that thousands of Irish and American children were raped by priests. Catholic-bashers frequently accuse the Catholic religion of promoting a childish narrative of good and evil that is immune to factual evidence. Yet they do precisely the same, in the service of their fashionable and irrational new religion of anti-Catholicism.

[@genevievedolan1288]

@@Im_straight-t4d yes, the truth is bad enough.

[@katejacobs5491]

Sticking to the bald facts is bad enough. One abused child, one terrified child, one broken child is enough. One disempowered shamed crushed pregnant woman is bad enough The real story for me is the command the church had on us all. Dissonance, we had no permission to trust our own experience. We were told what to think. When I first heard of the Taliban, I recognized it. It was indeed subtle. Apparently we were all happy and our sadness was not to be trusted. Bualadh bas to the team on this project.

[@be_courageous-l2kx]

‘Oppenheimer’ vs. ‘The Nun’. The contemplative life terrifies us more than ‘Art the Clown’. I don’t know if I could sit through a film about a fictional coal trader, who carries ‘a poor me’ look in his eyes wherever he goes, and a fictional religious drawn straight from ‘Dynasty’, who have a fictional conflict over fictional events…The lengths we go to! Who would ever say "your toast is getting cold?"

[@IvanildoRoseno-x1e]

👍👏🥺😂✌️

[@IvanildoRoseno-x1e]

😊😅😮✌️👍👏

[@aap2310]

Is matt in this too?! Why does he have to ruin everything?

[@RainFall800]

he is just the producer

[@ruralliving3024]

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have a production company together so they are producing it for Cillian who got the rights to the book by Claire Keegan

[@nualaaugenstein4971]

Like Matt Damon ❤

[@k8nPNW]

Ruin everything?? What an odd thing to say.

[@jlatimer716]

Mean

[@genevievedolan1288]

Has Cillian Murphy had ‘work’ done on his face? His cheekbones seem different and seem too defined to be quite real ….hope I am wrong….

[@mariamezzat4647]

I think it's normal. Maybe it could seems a bit different at sometimes, but i guess it's just due to some factors like tiredness. Sorry for my bad English.

[@sarahfooth50]

I also think his cheeks became a bit sunken with all the weight he lost for Oppenheimer.

[@annettegilbert3715]

Cillian is still a bit underweight after Oppenheimer 😊