Many of us turned to examining our pasts in lockdown, in a desire to understand how we got to where we were, what we’d left behind and what truly mattered still. In March 2020, with theatres and cinemas closed, Kenneth Branagh began writing the script for this film about his life as a nine-year-old boy in Belfast, 50 years earlier. Without any distractions, and needing to do no research, he finished it in just eight weeks. By September that year, it was being shot, under stringent safety protocols, not in Belfast but in an exhibition centre near Farnborough.
The film is entirely Branagh’s own story, in a way nothing else in his prolific career has been – but he does not appear in it. A coda was shot of him returning as an adult to the street in Belfast where he grew up, accompanied by the cast who play his family, but it was cut from the final edit: it would surely have been both superfluous and disruptive of the film’s integrity.
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