
            This film examines the legacy of Institutional abuse by the Irish Church and State over the last century. The story follows writer, Gerard Mannix Flynn, together with generations of his family who for the first time, speak openly together about their childhood traumatic experience of being removed from the family home and community and being incarcerated in children's homes and industrial institutions run by religious catholic orders. Land without God is a search for truth, for justice, for an understanding of what happened to a whole family when they were children.Gerard Mannix Flynn narrates this epic journey over a period from dawn to dusk.
The film begins in the inner city of Dublin and takes us through the landscapes of the Irish countryside and into the landscape of the deepest emotions and the pain of child abuse.
It focuses on the impact that violence had and is still having on them and their class.The film opens with the narrator recalling a litany of incarcerations from the age of 4. Flynn weaves us in and out of the city of Dublin as he recalls a childhood, a family home, a neighborhood, a working-class community.He interviews his family probing them to recall what it was like when he was taken away by the authorities for not going to school. What happened to the family and its devastating consequences are recalled in vivid detail.The doors of the closed institutions, the gulags, are opened and Flynn reenters into a past that hasn't gone away. That refuses to go away. That demands answers. Places like Daingean, Letterfrack, Artane, Passage West resonate with Irish people and send terror into the hearts of many who were locked up here as children.
These places and names are known the world over for their brutality. There is no hope here. No room for sentimentality or pity.Out of this darkness comes a story full of integrity intelligence and dignity. The true spirit of the individuals and the family as a whole emerges for the first time. There is a possibility that the unfixable can be fixed through the telling of the uninterrupted human story.
A consciousness arrives and falls upon the participants as they realize throughout the film that they truly own this story and that the first person that has to listen is themselves.What happened in Ireland since the foundation of the state was a brutal and a sustained attack on women and on children particularly those that were deemed to be undesirable. Indeed, the very founders of that state, the first government, set about confining thousands of individuals as children and then throughout their lives. To this day many of those that were incarcerated have not been given any answers. Not been given any truth, not been given any justice. The chances are and the realization is, that they never will. They just remain criminalized.Land Without God came about through that realization and the need to address it through this documentary film. This is a cultural presentation of what happened to a working-class family by in large made by a working-class family. Child sexual abuse is not something that can be consigned to history. It is not something that you get over. It is probably the most difficult thing for any person to discuss. This film is a testament to the extraordinary courage and bravery of members of one particular family.
Industrial Schools were established in Ireland in 1868.
Up to 100,000 children were unjustly incarcerated, tortured and systematically abused.
The schools were phased out by the Irish State in 2007.
    

Gerard Mannix Flynn

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