71: Double Troubles: Belfast & The Image You Missed (with Ben Nash) (Patreon)

Ben Nash, a PhD student at Kings College London and a writer whose work has appeared at Mubi and Splice Today, joins the show from Colchester, England to discuss two recent films about “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, each grappling in their own way with issues of history, family, memory and cinema.

One of the favourites to win big at this year’s Academy Awards, Belfast (2021) has been called director Kenneth Branagh’s “most personal film”, a depiction of his childhood as sectarian violence gripped his neighbourhood. It’s a film that views the turbulent era from a Protestant child’s perspective, but it’s notably a story that for the most part omits the city’s Catholic population from the narrative.

In the excellent 2018 documentary essay-film The Image You Missed, filmmaker Donal Foreman grapples with the legacy of his estranged father, the late American guerrilla filmmaker Arthur MacCaig, who shot documentaries about the conflict in Northern Ireland from the on-the-ground perspective of the Irish Republican socialist left.

Along the way we summarize the conflict in Northern Ireland, Branagh’s peripatetic directing career, the idea of “personal films” and the challenges of mixing monochrome and multicolour in cinema.

The Image You Missed is available for rent at Vimeo On Demand 

Follow Ben Nash on Twitter.

Trailer for Belfast (Branagh, 2021)

Trailer for The Image You Missed (Foreman/MacCaig, 2018)

Trailer for Death on the Nile (Branagh, 2022)