Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast is a loosely autobiographical love letter to his hometown in Northern Ireland, steeped in his memories of growing up on a small street in a working-class Belfast neighborhood in the late 1960s where Catholics and Protestants lived peacefully side by side.

The film is told from the point of view of young Buddy (Jude Hill) as his parents Ma (Caitríona Balfe) and Pa (Jamie Dornan) struggle to make ends meet, while trying to steer clear of the sectarian strife breaking out around them. Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds play Buddy’s grandparents (Granny and Pop). The family is ultimately forced to grapple with a dilemma that’s been at the core of the Irish identity for centuries – whether to stay in their beloved homeland and make the best of it, or join the Irish diaspora in search of better life ‘across the water.’ And while the film is set against the backdrop of The Troubles, it puts the audience in the shoes of a young Protestant boy with a major crush on a Catholic girl, while madness erupts around them.

Dublin-based editor Úna Ní Dhonghaíle, ACE, BFE, whose work has earned a slew of accolades from BAFTA, the Royal Television Society and the Irish Film and Television Awards, recalls that she was editing Branagh’s upcoming adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile at Longcross Studios just outside London in March of 2020 when the pandemic struck and she had to return home to Dublin to continue working remotely. “When I returned in June … Ken told me that while we were in lockdown, he had written a script – and he was very modest, very bashful really – and he said, ‘Would you like to read it? I’d love you to do it if it’s your cup of tea.’”

When she read the script, she knew right away that she wanted to be involved. “It was the most beautiful love letter to the city of Belfast, and to his beautiful family, and I just thought, ‘Yeah, I would be honored to join him on this journey.’” She reveals that she could see echoes of her own family in the script. “My dad’s family are all from the North, Omagh Co Tyrone, and as soon as I read it, I recognized them in the story.

Ken’s family may have been Protestant and mine are Catholic, but Ken captured the vernacular of the people of Northern Ireland – that ability to quote a song, or a poem at the drop of a hat, just to emphasize a point – and also the humor and the love of community, of all creeds, that existed before The Troubles.”

The prolific filmmaker wanted to shoot the film in September 2020 and finish it quickly in the fall and since her next project was delayed due to the pandemic, Dhonghaíle was able to squeeze it into her schedule. Of course, pandemic restrictions hung over the process, and for the most part, she had to work remotely from Dublin. “Thankfully, we had already worked together on Death on the Nile and I had done All Is True the previous year, so we had developed a shorthand and a very good way of speaking with each other,” she recalls.

She reports that they have sympathetic filmmaking sensibilities and work very well together. “We can equally challenge each other and come up with new ideas and it’s always a great process, when you’re working with somebody like that.” Dhonghaíle worked feverishly on her Avid Media Composer to keep up with production so that in the end, filming wrapped on a Friday, and by Tuesday they were able to review the cut. “We spoke every single day. We were in email contact constantly, because of the nature of working remotely,” she says.

“Ken’s an early riser, so I would send him the cut late at night. He would watch it first thing in the morning and then we’d speak at about 8 a.m. and go through all the notes. Throughout the day I could send him excerpts that he could spot check and discuss. Tamar Thomas is one of our producers and she was always on hand to chat to – they are great people to work with.”

According to the editor, the story revealed itself quite naturally in the editing process. “As with every script, you have your shoot and then the edited piece takes on another life,” she says. “We were forensic in interrogating the rushes and moving scenes if we thought that they would have more emotional or visceral impact if they came a little bit later.

If there were too many scenes with the family in a row, or shot with the same long held style, maybe it was better to spread them out a little bit and create a flow. We also collapsed some scenes and used Van Morrison’s music to create vignettes, which added more pace and variety of storytelling. “Both of us had an eye on eeking out the humanity in the performances,” she adds. “And we had the most exquisite performances from our incredible cast, especially little Jude Hill – to make sure that this little boy could stand up in any scene, alongside Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds, Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe, and he did it with a smile on his face.”

Editorially, Dhonghaíle was always conscious of the fact that they were delving into Branagh’s personal memories, all told from the point of view of a child who bore witness to those events. “I think the style suited the memory palette, and it allowed us the freedom not to have to delve into too much of the historical, factual context of Northern Ireland, because it’s the boy’s story,” she says. “You couldn’t do justice to the complexity of that history in a 90-minute film, and also tell the story of this family. So, I think, by shooting it as Ken did, it allows for the subjective point of view of the child to be celebrated.”

The editor says that she relished going through the footage trying to grab “every little nugget of gold” that she could find.
“[Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, BSC] did a great mix between that painterly, composed style with a huge depth of field … but then I loved the fact that they also went all infor the riot, shooting with two cameras, getting every little [detail] of the thing.
“Understanding the value of the mise-en-scène is as important for an editor as controlling the rhythm between the shots
and Ken and Haris framed this film beautifully,” she adds.

“The stillness allowed the sense of memory to breathe, and the performances of the brilliant cast possessed a simplicity and authenticity which I loved. We used sound and music as another character to further enrich the film.” The editor explains that she likes to start building a rich sound bed early in the editorial process, so she started with sounds like foghorns and church bells to help build the ambiance of the Northern port city. “I find that in my editing, a rich sound bed actually helps convey what I’m trying to do. Otherwise, if it’s too sparse, it can expose the scene and make the director feel a bit vulnerable, and then we might end up cutting things out that maybe would hold up with a little bit of sound design and music.

“In August, I asked Ken, what sound memories he had from childhood and he said, ‘Trains, always trains passing by, or the milkman’s call, the ice cream van or the “rag and bone man” who used to shout out loud.’ So, we immediately began to build that up in a temporary way, even before principal photography began, until our great sound team joined us in the middle of October.”

She adds that her assistants were essential in helping to build an authentic sound bed during this time. First assistant editor Carly Brown worked alongside Dhonghaíle for the duration of the edit, while associate editor Simon Davis and production coordinator Matthew Tucker worked for a couple of months each to help oversee the technicaldelivery of the film. In addition, three second  assistants – Lydia Mannering, ND Quynh and Tímea Kalderák – came on board for two months each; such is the nature of independent films, one taking over from the other as schedules permitted.

“The team were fantastic and alongside our brilliant VFX supervisor Matt Glen we worked hard during the shoot to ensure that the film looked and sounded authentic and stylish,” says Dhonghaíle. “I would edit each scene during the shoot and hand over the sequences to Carly and Lydia to tracklay with me, adding the rich atmosphere of Belfast, which added to the immediacy and specificity of memory.”

While the film is mostly black and white, the director employed a bit of poetic license in certain scenes with splashes of color to highlight the profound influence that film and theater had on him in his younger years. The editor says that Branagh’s use of color offers a kind of “magic realism, to denote what film meant to his younger self, and the escape that it offered against the black-and-white reality – the social realism of life.” In terms of music, she explains that while normally, they might work with a temp track, in this case, Branagh had written his musical references into the script, in particular, tracks from Van Morrison – another native of Northern Ireland – whose classic songs give the film a distinctive voice.

But there is one major exception near the end of the film. After the death of Pop, followed by a traditional Irish wake and funeral, the family gathers at the local pub for a celebration of life and Jamie Dornan’s Pa gets on stage and sings “Everlasting Love” directly to his wife.

“To me, this was another little bit of the magic realism. It’s revealing something to an audience that you wouldn’t see in real life,” she explains. “So the ‘Everlasting Love’ sequence, I just enjoyed it as a bit of that heightened reality, of what it must have felt like to bury Pops and there was probably a sing song afterwards. But through the eyes of the child, this is his mom and dad, and the subtext of the scene is to show the audience they were coming together, despite all the stresses and tensions of tax and pressures of life, they love one another.”

She adds that the sequence provided a much-needed release at that point in the film. “It was so sad when Pops died. If you didn’t have ‘Everlasting Love,’ then from the death of Pop to the family’s departure from Belfast would be so sad. It would just be grief upon grief,” she says.

Overall, Dhonghaíle hopes that the film will transcend the walls of Belfast and resonate with people on the universal level, and that audiences can enjoy a bit of feel-good escapism and relate to the humanity of the characters. “After the year of pandemic that we’ve had, I hope that they really enjoy it and see it for what it is. It’s a celebration of a beautiful family, a magnificent city and a moment in time when these communities lived side by side, all seen through the eyes of this child,” she concludes. “We’re all human, which I think is a good message in this world at this moment where we’ve all gone a little bit mad