The autobiographical portrait of the Irish actor and filmmaker will conclude the program of 226 titles of the best European cinema on November 13th.
Seville, October 25, 2021 - Director Kenneth Branagh's most personal work, Belfast, will close the 18th edition of the Seville Festival on Saturday, November 13th, following an intense week in which the festival will have screened 226 films across theaters in Seville while hosting more than 500 guests.
Photographed under the signature of Branagh's regular cinematographer, Haris Zambarloukos, Belfast narrates the childhood of Buddy (little Jude Hill), a nine-year-old working class boy, in the convulsive decade of the 60s in the capital of Northern Ireland. The story has undeniable parallelisms with Branagh's life and traces a moving, luminous and heartbreaking journey through the riots and violence of the city, dreams in a movie theater, family relationships and first love. The Irish filmmaker captures his own memories to pay homage to the place where he lived before escaping the armed conflict with his family. The film focuses on his emotional and cinematographic formation, where his escapes from reality in front of the big screen were fundamental, devouring, like Buddy, the main character of the film, westerns such as High Noon or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Also Irish, Jamie Dornan (star of 50 Shades of Grey) and Caitriona Balfe (popular for the Outlander series) play the couple inspired by Kenneth Branagh's parents. Playing the protagonist's grandmother, they are accompanied by veteran Judi Dench (Oscar for Shakespeare in Love with an extremely long career with films like Mrs Brown, Iris and, giving life to M, a handful of Bond films such as Casino Royale and Skyfall). The film also features the participation of another distinguished citizen of Belfast, the singer Van Morrison, featuring up to eight classics and one specially composed for the film.
Winner of the Audience Award at the last Toronto Festival, Belfast is the director's return to a more intimate and personal cinema, which he developed at the beginning of his career behind the camera, as in Peter's Friends (1992) or In the Bleak Midwinter (1995). Kenneth Branagh emerged with brilliant Shakespearean adaptations, such as Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Hamlet (1996) or As You Like It (2006), to end up settling in Hollywood and signing blockbusters such as Thor (2011), Cinderella (2015), Murder on the Orient Express (2017) or the still unreleased Death on the Nile (2021).
The film will be released in theaters only on January 7, 2022, distributed by Universal Pictures International Spain.
