Liam Neeson read a 2017 New York Times article about Catherine Corless and felt two things simultaneously: shame as an Irish Catholic and obligation as someone with the power to do something. He optioned Dan Barry's piece the same year, visited Corless at her farm in Galway, and began assembling a production — his first as a producer — that would take nine more years to reach screens. That timeline is itself a small argument about how hard it is to get difficult institutional truths made into cinema. The Lost Children of Tuam arrives as forensic archaeologists are actively excavating the 5,000 square metre site where the Bon Secours order is believed to have interred 796 infants who died at St Mary's mother and baby home between 1925 and 1961. Since excavations began last year, skeletal remains of 99 babies and children have been recovered. The film and the dig are running in parallel, which gives the release a weight that no marketing campaign could manufacture. Corless was a former textile factory secretary with an interest in local history when she began researching the institution for an essay. Officials and the Bon Secours order deflected her at every turn. She kept going. She discovered that 796 children had died without burial records before the institution closed in 1961 and was demolished. Some infants, the investigation eventually revealed, had been buried in a disused subterranean septic tank. Corless didn't have institutional backing. She had stubbornness and a paper trail. Monica Dolan, an English actor, plays Corless in the film — a casting choice that Corless herself initially met with curiosity. "She has an English accent so how on earth did she capture the way I speak?" Corless told the Guardian. She's watched the film three times now, including the premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh in July, where it won best Irish film. The film was written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and directed by Frank Berry. Early reviews in Variety describe it as sensitive and stirring. Berry says the film is fundamentally about what one person can achieve against institutional resistance. Andrew Bennett plays Corless's husband Aidan, and Corless says he's captured the man and the marriage accurately — a detail that matters because the film is not just about institutional horror but about the ordinary domestic life from which Corless's extraordinary persistence grew. "We're ordinary people. We have a farm," she said. The film carries "the odd little bit of humour," she added, which is probably the only way it could be bearable. Neeson's involvement reframes what might have been a local Irish documentary subject into something with international distribution leverage. His motivation wasn't prestige — it was the specific, visceral reaction of an Irish Catholic altar boy reading about what the church and state did together, and did quietly, for decades. "The detective work she did to uncover this atrocity involving the relationship between the state and the church was extraordinary," he said. The film is released in Ireland this week and in the UK next month.
