FILM

Sat 24th Sept 7.30pm: BELFAST (12A) 2022, UK, 98min, dir Kenneth Branagh.

Cast: Caitriona Balfe, Judi Dench, Jamie Dornan, Ciaran Hinds, Jude Hill. 'Belfast' is the humorous, tender and intensely personal story of one boy's childhood during the tumult of the late 1960s. Winner of the 2022 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, Kenneth Branagh’s paean to the city of his birth is a dramatic and euphoric portrait of Belfast in the late 1960s. Branagh was still a young boy when he permanently left Belfast for the UK. But the memory of it – the city’s sights and sounds – has remained powerful. Here, he recounts life on a street that is torn apart by sectarianism yet remains a world of adventure for young Buddy. Opening with a colourful aerial tableau of modern-day Belfast, the film quickly moves to the past and lustrous black and white, as it recounts the initial divisions that crop up between Catholics and Protestants. ‘Kenneth Branagh’s memoir is black-and-white and rose-tinted all over. The film is aggressively apolitical but as romanticised reverie it could hardly be bettered.’ The Irish Times.