Belfast, a hot favorite to become the first Oscar best picture winner made during the pandemic, was inspired by the “other lockdown” of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, its writer-director Kenneth Branagh said Tuesday.
The critically acclaimed black-and-white drama — out Friday — received its glitzy Los Angeles premiere at the newly minted Academy Museum this week, as its studio Focus Features gears up for a lengthy award season campaign for the movie based on Branagh’s childhood.
“It came out of that silence that a lot of us stared into at the beginning of the lockdown and it certainly sent me back to this other lockdown that we experienced where both ends of the street were barricaded,” said Branagh. The Shakespearean stage actor-turned-movie star and director moved with his family to England in the late 1960s to escape escalating violence in Northern Ireland.
The movie begins with a scene of street violence in the summer of 1969, when Protestant gangs attack Catholic families to force them out of streets where the two groups had lived side by side.
“I was 16 when 1969 arrived and I have memories of the thrill of this explosion, and it was only a day later that I started to see the menace of it,” said co-star Ciaran Hinds, who, like many of the cast, grew up in Belfast.
“My childhood at that time was the sound of the city at night, and explosions in the distance echoed off the hills of Belfast, or gunfire at night.” The so-called “Troubles” would blight the British province for the next three decades, dividing communities along religious and nationalist lines.