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BELFAST Kenneth Branagh revisits his childhood for a ’60s-set coming-of-ager.
This is a story and a picture that I wanted to make for a long time,” Kenneth Branagh tells Teasers. He may be best known for his love of the Bard, but Sir Ken’s first love was the city he grew up in, now the setting for his most personal movie to date. “The sounds of Belfast, the sounds of the street - really, that sound has been going through my mind and my spirit for the 50 years or so since I left.”
Unfolding primarily during a sweltering summer in August 1969, Belfast stars Catriona Balfe and Jamie Dornan as Ma and Pa, but is seen through the eyes of nine-year-old Buddy (newcomer Jude Hill) who loves three things: football, cinema and a girl called Katherine. At a time of great change, Buddy finds himself transitioning into adolescence amid an alarming rise in sectarian violence.
“The film is about the joys and sorrows of one working-class family in one street, dealing with catastrophic change to their previously peaceful neighbourhood,” says Branagh, whose own family fled Northern Ireland in 1969 to escape the Troubles. Describing the film as a work of “auto-fiction” which recounts the “emotional truth of what I remember”, the script (Branagh’s first
original screenplay since 1995’s In The Bleak Midwinter) came surprisingly easily.
“I once read about someone asking a composer the question: ‘How did you write that piece of music?’” Branagh recalls. “The composer said, ‘I listened, and I wrote down what I heard.’ [I heard] that Belfast humour, and that energy.”
Branagh isn’t the only filmmaker to look inward over the last year Steven Spielberg is currently making
The Fabelmans, a similarly semiautobiographical saga. This is no coincidence; the circumstance of the pandemic helped bring Belfast to fruition. “I’m writing about a city that went into a kind of lockdown,” says Branagh, who shot the film on the streets of Belfast in August and September 2020. “Through the lens of our own lockdown, this story found its way onto the page.”
Also pertinent to our current moment is the fact the film is “about a love of cinema, when the cinematic experience is under threat”, according to Branagh. Shot in “immersive” black and white, Buddy’s burgeoning imagination is greatly expanded by his love for film, and becomes a way for him to process a loss of innocence.
“A significant movie for this kid is High Noon,” says Branagh. “And
The Searchers, and The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance. They become a way to codify this now-dangerous exploding environment around him, and make it understandable, because so much of it was overwhelming. Looking at things through cinema becomes a salvation for him.” It’s a feeling we all know well. JF