Belfast

Kenneth Branagh's Belfast premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September 2021 and went on to take the Toronto International Film Festival's People's Choice Award — historically one of the most reliable predictors of Academy Award attention. The film is Branagh's most directly autobiographical work: he was born in Belfast in 1960 and his own family relocated to England in 1970 in the early aftermath of the Troubles, the same trajectory the film traces through the eyes of its nine-year-old protagonist Buddy.

The cast pairs Jude Hill — eleven years old at the time of casting, in his screen debut — with 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. Cinematography is by Haris Zambarloukos, Branagh's regular collaborator since Sleuth in 2007, working in deliberately stark high-contrast black-and-white that quotes Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947) — a film Belfast residents Buddy and his family attend in the picture itself.

The score is by Van Morrison, the Belfast-born musician whose 1960s and 1970s albums provide nine new and existing tracks across the film. Branagh wrote the screenplay during the early-pandemic lockdown of 2020 in approximately eight weeks. The film is now widely cited alongside Steve McQueen's Small Axe series (2020) and Aleem Khan's After Love (2020) as part of the recent wave of British autobiographical-historical filmmaking.