Sex in a Cold Climate is a 1998 Irish documentary film detailing the mistreatment of "fallen women" in the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.
Phyllis Valentine was sent from her orphanage in County Clare to an asylum in Galway aged just fifteen because the nuns at the orphanage considered her to be "too pretty" and at risk of "falling away" (in other words, becoming pregnant); Martha Cooney told a relative she had been sexually assaulted by her cousin, and she was whisked off to a laundry too; and Christina Mulcahy gave birth to a child out of wedlock.
The women recall the abuse they suffered at the hands of Catholic religious orders and the gruelling working regime in the laundries.
While many of the penitents stayed in the laundries all their lives, Phyllis Valentine, Martha Cooney, and Christina Mulcahy eventually left the laundries under different circumstances: Valentine began to rebel against the nuns, refusing to do her work, even letting her hair grow and throwing a tantrum when the nuns brought a hairdresser in to cut it.
Mulcahy, meanwhile, was facing the prospect of life inside the laundry, but after three years, she managed to escape, and she fled to Northern Ireland to work as a nurse.