A film about mothers—both absent and adoptive—that documents a visionary devotion to the Virgin Mary in rural Ireland and the horrors that exist beneath the surface of the country’s Catholic institutions. In 1985, the village of Ballinspittle in Ireland was the site of a mass visionary experience. Worshippers at the local grotto saw the statue of the Virgin Mary come to life. Soon, thousands made the pilgrimage and—for a summer—the phenomenon gripped the country. Almost forty years later, a handful of local devotees remain, including the statue’s dutiful caretaker Patrick Joseph Simms. Through Simms and a chorus of locals, the film documents the mystical landscape of rural Irish Catholicism and a terrible darkness that lies beneath. The film uses formal and stylistic experimentation in an effort to depict the transcendent experience of its subjects. This offers a credibility to the experience of the film’s contributors, whose voices have been deliberately dismissed by the institution that oversees their faith.

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