Sto'bought This is a companion piece to the film The Magdalene Sisters, but is more brutal, and also more beautiful. Not for the squeamish, this work of art is a fantastic example of why we have film as an art form and as a way to bring light to social injustices. There are countless holy people--true saints--who have found Jesus through various Christian constructs such as Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, and a wide variety of Protestant versions. However, for the most part those involved in maintaining the structures themselves are not Christlike at all, but demonic. Jesus promises that if anyone hurts one of his little ones, it is better that a millstone is tied around his neck and that he is then thrown into the sea. Maybe it's just me, but I never want to be on the other end of that warning. It's really too bad that there are those who do find themselves there, hiding their evil behind self-righteousness.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU The first lay teacher, William Franklin, in Saint Jude's Reformatory and Industrial school in Ireland in 1939, coming back from the defeated republican war in Spain, had a hard time with the prefect of the school, a brutal and sadistic disciplinary brute, "brother" and why not "father" John.This first lay teacher will nearly leave some time around Christmas 1939 when John beat to death Liam Mercier, a child that William Franklin had saved from total rejection and submission to his fate of pariah. The children unanimously stopped him when he was leaving after John and his accomplice Mac, a priest who was abusing some children, had been moved out of the school, one to go preach Africans in Africa and the other to take care of a parish in the USA. In other words the murder went unpunished.Things were changing since the separation wall between the younger boys and the older boys was being brought down by the priests and by the kids. The school was finally able to contemplate a happier future and the boys committed here by justice were finally able to consider some kind of a positive future.The film insists on the fact that such boys who have been rejected by their families, then by society and locked up behind bars need like all children, but it is a lot more difficult to give them what they need, motivation to learn, understanding based on listening and love, a lot of love, and that's where this refectory and industrial school system was completely wrong. The guidance these kids needed and expected could easily be turned into complete alienation and physical violence and the love they looked for and wanted could be twisted into sexual abuse in a jiffy.The main lesson from such a real episode as depicted in this film is that these boys were not responsible for what they were to become on the basis of what they had been and had done because between the two, the past and the future, the present of education, understanding and love was transformed into alienation, deprivation, exploitation, violence and abuse by some sadistic and perverted adults, unluckily tolerated by the others who lacked the courage to say no.But the last scene of this film is a full symbol of the love these kids expect from the adult world and the love they are able to give back when they have been nourished and nurtured with what they need to be and become.This is a very beautiful film that adds to this sad Irish episode some dramatic flashbacks on the Spanish Civil War and the news about the beginning of the Second World War. Unluckily history was to make William Franklin die on the beaches of Normandy in 1944. He was not able to see the future of the world in which he had fought all his living years against injustice and violence.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

PeterJordan I'd been skirting past this one in the video shop for ages wondering whether it was gonna be too depressing and harrowingly sad to sit through.And before continuing I have to say I love the Irish characters that Aidan Quinn has created from Playboys, thru This is My father and Harry Boland in Michael Collins - all characters you can empathize with and truly feel their pain, largely, it must be said, because of the projection of Quinns acting.The only Irish "reform school" I've ever visited is the building that used to house Letterfrack Industrial School in Co Galway, now (somewhat ironically considering some of the scenes in SFaRB) a fine arts furniture college. But to say that the building is still haunted by the ghosts of the boys and the pain and abuse inflicted there is an understatement. It literally oozes and sweats from the very walls of the former institution, defying every admirable attempt by the current education guardians to drag it into the present and positively project its glorious current use.And so, whilst what is effectively a "year in the life" of this particular unidentified industrial school, does manage to capture in a nutshell much of this pain, and instill in the audience a huge anger at what was perpetuated in these places in both the name of reform and religion, somewhere in the back of ones mind there is a discomfort that it's all being just a bit too neatly packaged, summarized and concluded for the benefit of Hollywood and the happy ending with a massive nod to Dead Poets Society when in reality, as still continues to be daily documented in the Irish courts and tribunals of Inquiry and media reports into such abuse, this was not and sadly never would be something that one brave and progressive teacher might have hope to take on and buck the system - As the tragic caption at the end points out, this system of education and authority with all it's abuses persisted in Ireland right up to 1984 and along it way produced such brilliant and brave people Don Baker, Paddy Doyle (The God Squad), Colm O'Gorman and Mannix Flynn but equally claimed as victims such brilliant and capable people as Noel Browne, and probably most tragically, the graveyard and unmarked graves behind Letterfrack college bears testament to the many many young boys that shed their very lives to these institutions - So to try to imply (for whatever feel good factor and positive connotations it gains) that one man may have successfully stood up to this system during the first year of the "Emergency" in 1939/40 and everything was hunky Dorey after that and the authorities and the church sat up and took notice, is just too syrupy of a picture and a quick fix solution when one is sadly aware that the tragic reality is far removed and some 50 odd years away from that - and whilst it was admittedly a very good picture, this simplistic portrayal of a huge and continuing Irish problem, served to tarnish rather than endow the film as a whole.

annahelm While i lived in Ireland, a friend and i went to the movies in Cork and saw "A song for a Raggy boy" i never thought i would like the movie. But guess what, it was one of the best movies i ever seen. It really touched me, I cried and felt so much for the movie. Its one of the best movies i have ever seen, and i have seen much! Now after seeing this movie i cant help but thinking of another movie that resebels this one, well not so much resembles but made me fell the same, its "Schindler's list". Both movies is based on a true story and about a man that tries to change or change others. Both these movies have an effect to make people understand how we work, and it is scary that we, as a well developed of species, act like brutal animals. Its scary to see. just as you can see it in Mel Gibson's movies "The passion of the Christ". We are not and have never been a nice species. we are just as bad as any other. But for you who want to see a movie that touches and makes you see something else then the classical Hollywood movies, see this one.