I discovered a great series on the Sundance channel called DOCDay. All day on Mondays they play documentaries. We are talking a film buff nirvana - well, if you like documentaries anyway. As I love 'real' stories, the documentary is probably my favorite type of film. I saw some decent ones today.

Westray was a documentary about the May 9, 1992, explosion in a Nova Scotia coalmine. This film takes a poetic approach to the tragedy as they tell the story from the viewpoints of three coal miners and three widows. It is a very moving film of corporate irresponsibility and small town working families. A damn good job by director, Paul Cowan.

RATING 8 out of 10

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Sex in a Cold Climate was another disturbing documentary that exposed how more than 100 years, young Irish women deemed guilty of sexual impropriety were condemned by their church to the Magdalene Asylums, brutal institutions where the teenagers were forced to toil in laundries. This remarkable documentary presents first-hand testimony from four women emotionally scarred by their treatment in the asylums between 1940 and 1960. It is another example of great storytelling about another shocking and sordid episode in the history of the Catholic Church.

RATING 8 out of 10

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Abused and Catholic was another jab and the Papacy. Maybe they are getting all the jabs because their is such a long history of abuse and coverup perpetrated by the Catholic Church. It begins with the furor in Boston surrounding pedophilia, the Church and Cardinal Law. It is a very important subject, but I feel the filmmaker, Mark Dowd, a gay former priesthood student, spent more time trying to prove his point that "hey, its not just the gays that are diddling kids" (I paraphased) than the more important matter of the Catholic Church's history of abuse of power and strongarm tactics to cover up 'transgressions.'

RATING 6 out of 10

- posted by Chris @ 8:57 PM