Belfast

Kenneth Branagh's Belfast premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September 2021 and went on to take the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, historically one of the most reliable predictors of Academy Award attention. It is Branagh's most directly autobiographical work. He was born in Belfast in 1960, and his own family moved to England in 1970, in the early years of the Troubles; the film sees that time through the eyes of its nine-year-old protagonist, Buddy.

Jude Hill (eleven years old when he was cast, in his screen debut) plays Buddy, alongside Caitríona Balfe (the lead of Outlander), Jamie Dornan, Judi Dench (in her sixth collaboration with Branagh, after Hamlet, Henry V, Murder on the Orient Express and others) and Ciarán Hinds, the Belfast-born veteran for whom the role is a homecoming in the most literal sense. Haris Zambarloukos, Branagh's regular cinematographer since Sleuth in 2007, works in deliberately stark, high-contrast black and white that quotes Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947), a film Buddy and his family go to see within the story.

The score is by Van Morrison, the Belfast-born musician, who contributes nine tracks, new songs alongside material from his 1960s and 1970s albums. Branagh wrote the screenplay in about eight weeks during the early-pandemic lockdown of 2020. It belongs with Steve McQueen's Small Axe series (2020) and Aleem Khan's After Love (2020) in the recent wave of British filmmaking that turns personal and family history into drama.