BRANAGH DELVES INTO CHILDHOOD TROUBLES WITH OSCAR-TIPPED ‘BELFAST’

TORONTO, CANADA—Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-tipped “Belfast”—a love letter to the hometown he fled as a child—comes at a poignant time when peace remains fragile in Northern Ireland, the director said on Sunday at the Toronto film festival.

The deeply personal, blackand-white dramedy, which hits theaters in November, captures the late-1960s outbreak of the province’s violent “Troubles” from the perspective of Buddy, a 9-yearold boy.

At that same age, Branagh and his family moved to England to escape escalating violence which for the next three decades would rip apart communities along religious and nationalist faultlines.

“A story like this tries to see that even in the midst of extraordinary danger and chaos, there’s still amazing qualities in that town,” the actor-director told

AFP on the red carpet.

People in Belfast are resilient and “have come through an amazing number of challenges—of which the latest is in the air,” he added.

Northern Ireland has suffered some of its worst unrest in recent years after Britain’s decision to leave the European Union highlighted enduring divisions.

“Bomb scares every weekend when you’re trying to meet your mates in town—that sort of stuff that became normal to us ... now in hindsight is insane,” recalled star Jamie Dornan, who also drew on his childhood growing up in Belfast.

Unrest

“There’s always going to be unrest in Northern Ireland, that’s the craic sadly,” he said.

“But people for the most part have lived harmoniously for 23

years now,” he added, saying Brexit now posed a threat to the fragile peace in place since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

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.

British troops are deployed,

and Buddy’s father is confronted with the difficult decision of whether to uproot his family from the tight-knit community they call home.

But the violence in “Belfast” is viewed through the eyes of a child (Jude Hill) who has only a partial grasp of its gravity, and the film features plenty of humorous moments.

Branagh was able to field a stellar cast including Dornan, Judi Dench, Caitriona Balfe and Ciaran Hinds.

His film has earned rave reviews and received a raucous standing ovation at Toronto, leading many to already tip it as a strong Oscars contender next March.

Good momentum

“It feels like there’s a good momentum to the film. But you can’t really get carried away with all that,” Dornan, widely known for “Fifty Shades of Grey” and TV crime series “The Fall,” told AFP.

Branagh, whose acclaimed career ranges from Shakespeare to “Thor,” said he had been planning “Belfast” for decades, but finally began writing it during Britain’s first pandemic lockdown of March 2020.

“It seemed that 18 months ago, we were beginning to understand that kind of disorientation ... not with violence, but with the threat of this virus which locked us all down,” he said.

Elsewhere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday, Jessica Chastain’s “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” had its world premiere.

Beneath layers of Faye’s trademark heavy makeup, the Oscar-nominated “Zero Dark Thirty” star is transformed into the eccentric and compassionate US televangelist, whose husband Jim Bakker was jailed for defrauding their millions of followers.

Chastain produced the movie after learning that Faye—who was never charged in relation to her partner’s crimes—had clashed with evangelists over her acceptance of the LGBTQ community at the height of the AIDS epidemic.