The award-winning film told the true story of The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team – the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative journalist unit in the United States.
The movie showed how the Church and officials had turned a blind eye to child sex abuse for some three decades in the Boston area.
Journalists painstakingly investigated cases of widespread and systemic child sex abuse by numerous Roman Catholic priests.
The resulting series of stories sent shockwaves through the Church and earned The Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
The investigation led to prosecutors, judges and politicians – who once looked the other way when it came to the church’s dirty laundry – subsequently holding church leaders to account.
Starring Michael Keaton as editor Walter Robinson, and Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo as reporters Sacha Pfeiffer and Mike Rezendes, Spotlight won an Oscar for Best Picture on its release in 2015, along with Best Original Screenplay from six nominations in total.
Variety magazine described the lm as “a superbly controlled and engrossingly detailed account of the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into the widespread paedophilia scandals and subsequent cover-ups within the Catholic Church”.
