Cross and Passion

A film documenting how the Troubles affect the Catholic women living on and around a cheerless, battle-scarred Belfast estate. A schoolgirl, a housewife, a nun speak fluently (though in accents often elusive to an English ear) of the forces shaping their daily lives. British soldiers are shown only as distant figures in khaki squatting by house corners, rifles cocked, next to kids who imperviously continue their games. The film's title (the name of a Catholic girls' school) proposes as more immediate, more powerful a source of oppression the papist catechism of chastity and sexual guilt passed on through generations of Irish women. The nuns also preach meekness and resignation in the face of the God-sent Troubles, but the implied connections between Church and occupying forces are never fully explored.