1,450 words

What is it like to be part of a family as large as a nation? If that family is the city of Belfast and that nation is the Irish, then Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast gives us quite the clue. Effectively, this film is a love letter to the Irish people — and everything in it suggests that “the Irish” refers only to those who share a common ethnicity. Yes, there are a smattering of Asians in the film — which may be realistic, given that the story takes place in 1969 — but these so-called “people of color” are not employed against history as props but as fittingly minor aspects of the Belfast backdrop. This story is about the Irish and the Irish only.