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On Oct. 5, 1968, chaos broke out in the streets of Derry, Northern Ireland. As a civil rights parade wound through the streets, the police—or Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC)—blocked the protesters’ route, surrounding them. Forming two intimidating lines on either side, the RUC baton-charged protesters. Images of the violence were broadcast into homes around the globe. Writing later that month for the BBC magazine, The Listener, the poet Seamus Heaney declared the moment a “watershed in the political life of Northern Ireland.” After this, Heaney wrote, there could be no more “shades of grey.”
I thought of Heaney’s words as I watched Kenneth Branagh’s heavily autobiographical film Belfast, which releases in the U.S. on Nov. 12 following a successful run at fall film festivals. The film opens with glorious vistas of contemporary Belfast in full color, from its opening shot of the sunflower yellow of the Harland and Wolff cranes to the lilac sea-blues of the Titanic museum, and aerial footage of the city surrounded by the verdant green of Cave Hill, nestled in the crook of Belfast Loch. A version of Van Morrison’s “Coming Down to Joy” soundtracks these images. We only get a glancing look at this highlight of the city’s tourist reel before we soon lose the pigment for black and white Belfast of mid-August 1969.
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At first, the movie presents this moment in the city’s history as a more innocent time. We see the lead character, a young boy named Buddy (Jude Hill), playing with his friends in their terraced street in a “mixed” area of north Belfast, where both of Northern Ireland’s dominant two communities live alongside each other peacefully. These “two communities” have their roots in centuries of entanglements between Ireland and Britain, an often-fraught relationship exacerbated exponentially by the messy, violent partition of Ireland in 1921. The “two sides” are the nationalist or republican community, who are usually (but not…
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Source : time
