Film & TV
Jason Stone |
Kneecap: Hiphop in Belfast for the ceasefire generation.
15 January 2025
When people are watching 'Kneecap' - Rich Peppiatt's debut feature - they are gripped by a need to share the joy by messaging their friends, and they're doing it before they've even got to the end of the film.
In telling the story of Northern Ireland hiphop band Kneecap, writer/director Rich Peppiatt has endeavoured to make a film that is so far from the normal tropes of the biopic that most viewers are unlikely to guess that 'Kneecap' is a true story. It's all the more remarkable then that the three members of Kneecap play themselves in the film.
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Working with non-actors can be tricky at the best of times, but non-actors playing versions of themselves is absolutely perilous. That Peppiatt pulled it off is as much a tribute to Kneecap's three members - Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, Naoise Ó Cairealláin and J J Ó Dochartaigh - as it is to the director. Between them they have achieved something genuinely astonishing. |
Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Rich Peppiatt worked as a journalist and as his previous feature film was a documentary, it would have been reasonable to assume he might have considered making 'Kneecap' as a doc. Truth, as the old expression goes, is often stranger than fiction, and documentary is normally the best way of shining a spotlight on unlikely stories. |
As much as it focuses on the band, 'Kneecap' peripherally examines Belfast's ceasefire generation, and it's a film that makes you realise that almost all stories set in Northern Ireland are concerned with the lives of paramilitaries and those caught up in the violence of the second half of the twentieth century. That's not to say 'Kneecap' escapes the shadow of the conflict, but it is self-consciously not about 'the Troubles' and is all the more revealing about the legacy of the violence for this lack of explicitness. Throughout the film, the key terrain of the conflict between Britishness and Irishness concerns language, and the rejuvenation of the Irish language after many years of suppression. The importance of this issue never threatens to overwhelm the film, but it nonetheless provides its heartbeat. |
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Kneecap was always a film where the rulebook was out the window. |
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Rich Peppiatt |
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Ironically, a different conflict over language may arise if, as some are predicting, 'Kneecap' picks up the BAFTA for 'Outstanding British Film' on 16 February. Sympathy for the Republican cause in Northern Ireland has long been a litmus test among the nativists of the British Right, and the likes of Nigel Farage will complain bitterly if 'Kneecap' is honoured as a British film, not least because the film features a very funny cameo from Gerry Adams. |
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Just a regular night out in the world of Kneecap. |
In interview, Rich Peppiatt is keen to stress that the chaos of his project was a precisely calibrated affair, and although the director says, "Kneecap was always a film where the rulebook was out the window," it's clear that he and cinematographer Ryan Kernaghan abided by their own set of rules, and that their film is a tremendous showcase for their talent. |
One of the film's most fun takes on the enduring conflict between republicans and unionists in modern Northern Ireland arrives in the depiction of a sexual relationship between Liam and a young Protestant called Georgia which is based, in part, on the ritualistic name calling and festering hatred that continues between the two communities. The reduction of this bigotry to a form of foreplay is a brilliant act of subversion and has the potential to make people realise just how absurd it can be to allow prejudices to outlive the circumstances in which they were formed. This is one of a number of ways in which 'Kneecap' is a more consequential film than it might seem, and why it deserves all the plaudits that are predicted to come its way. |
Posted: 15 January 2025 - 19:23 |
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