An Irish family experiences a tumultuous time in the late 1960s in Director Kenneth Branagh’s drama, Belfast.
Branagh’s film is a semi-autobiographical tale that chronicles the life of a working-class family and their nine-year-old son's childhood during the late 1960s in the Northern Ireland capital, when their world is turned upside down by the political and religious clashes and everything he thought he understood about life is changed forever.
On December 5, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Branagh discussed the making of Belfast during a Q&A moderated by Director Christopher Nolan (Tenet).
During the conversation, Branagh revealed why the film shifts into black and white as it dips into the troubled Belfast of the past.
“I suppose it was driven by that idea of whilst saluting all the coping mechanisms — humor, music, song and dancing and anything that took you quickly to a lighter side — there was a darkness from which we emerged. The black and white was a way of looking in a sort of poetic or of soulful way at a working class environment and the sort of pictorial inspirations were movies from the ‘60s like This Sporting Life and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the kinds of pictures that I was watching on television. They seemed to me to carry this sort of additional weight, this forensic weight… you could you could go in go inside the characters’ minds. My cinematographer, Haris Zambarloukos, said that that with color you can absolutely describe people but with black and white in this kind of story, you can also feel people.”
In addition to Belfast, Branagh’s directorial credits include the feature films, Henry V, Dead Again, Peter's Friends, Much Ado About Nothing, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, A Midwinter's Tale, Hamlet, Love's Labour's Lost, As You Like It, The Magic Flute, Sleuth, Thor, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Cinderella, Branagh Theatre Live: The Winter's Tale, Branagh Theatre Live: Romeo and Juliet, Murder on the Orient Express, All Is True, Artemis Fowl and the upcoming Death on the Nile.
Branagh has been a DGA member since 1990.
You can listen to Branagh's Q&A by clicking the podcast episode embedded below. You can find more DGA podcast episodes here.