Kneecap

Rich Peppiatt's Kneecap won the Audience Award (World Cinema Dramatic) at Sundance 2024 and the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer/Director/Producer in 2025. The film became one of the most internationally consequential Irish-language productions of recent years and consolidated Peppiatt as a Belfast-based director after his earlier journalism and short-film career. The film features the actual Kneecap rap trio playing fictionalised versions of themselves.

Three Belfast kids (Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh (Móglaí Bap), Naoise Ó Cairealláin (Mo Chara) and JJ Ó Dochartaigh (DJ Próvaí)) turn their lives, drugs, and republican swagger into a hip-hop trio rapping primarily in the Irish language. The film tells a fictionalised origin story of the trio across approximately a year in West Belfast, with subsequent encounters with the music industry, the Northern Ireland Police Service, the Irish-language activist community, and the broader political-cultural environment of late-2010s Belfast. Michael Fassbender plays a fictional version of Mo Chara's father.

The film's commitment to a register of broad-comic biopic (gleefully irreverent about Irish-republican history, deliberately provocative about Northern Irish identity politics, sustained in actual Irish language for substantial sequences) produced a film that was the year's most-discussed Irish-language production. The actual band's continuing political-cultural reach has expanded substantially across the years since the film's release.