Ireland tells its own tales (w/ KNEECAP director Rich Peppiatt)

Rico travels to Dublin and Belfast, and hangs with an epic lineup of local heroes, to learn how Ireland went from a backdrop for Hollywood rom-coms... to one of the hottest film cultures on the planet. Featuring directors Rich Peppiatt (KNEECAP) and John Crowley (BROOKLYN), superproducer Ed Guiney (POOR THINGS), and acting legends Fiona Shaw (MY LEFT FOOT, KILLING EVE) and Carrie Crowley (THE QUIET GIRL).

Part travelogue, part deep-dive storytelling, the latest season sees host Rico Gagliano jet off to Ireland, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Istanbul, to learn about their cultures through the lens of cinema. Season 8’s guests include actors Gael García Bernal (AMORES PERROS) and Fiona Shaw (HOT MILK), writer/directors Rich Peppiatt (KNEECAP), Evan Goldberg (THE STUDIO) and Halina Reijn (BABYGIRL), producer Ed Guiney (POOR THINGS), production designer Eugenio Caballero (ROMA) and a host of other filmmakers, programmers, academics, cinema owners, critics, tour guides, and festival directors.

BRING THEM DOWN is now streaming on MUBI in North America, UK, Ireland, Latin America, Netherlands, Turkey and more. 

You can also catch the wonderful Fiona Shaw in HOT MILK, adapted from Deborah Levy’s bestselling novel. In cinemas July 4 across the UK, Ireland, Latin America, Germany and more. A MUBI release.

To watch some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode includes adult language, explicit sexual content, references to drugs and political violence, and spoilers. So as we start a new kinda globetrotting season of this show, I want to take you back to fall 2007 and my first trip as an overseas reporter for American Public Radio. It spoiled me forever. That's 'cause it was a trip to Ireland. The easiest place on earth to be a reporter. See, most times it's hard to convince people to talk when you pull out a microphone. In Ireland, they see a microphone and come running. Like, here's my favourite example. I was in the town of Knock, just taping the sound in a shop that sold religious artefacts.<i>Now €35 and five.</i> Eventually the shop owner offered me a cigarette and as I took it, still recording. Suddenly this random, very friendly little woman with a huge smile and twinkling eyes materialises beside us, announces she's from County Galway and asked...<i>Have you ever been to Woodford in County Galway?</i><i>No.</i><i>You should see what they smoke up there.</i><i>They make their own cigarettes. They make it from ganders faeces.</i><i>Yeah, that's what she said. Ganders faeces.</i> I swear to God, none of this was scripted.<i>- What is that?- You know, a male goose, a gander?</i><i>Well, the gander goes along up the mountain and the gander drops his faeces</i><i>here and here and here and here.</i><i>And the people collect up all the gander's faeces, and they roll them up</i><i>and they make cigarettes out of them, and they smoke them.</i><i>And not one of them ever had lung cancer.</i><i>Every one of them has a beautiful, clear voice, and their lungs</i><i>and their chests are perfect.</i><i>So this could be a solution--</i><i>I think everybody should quit the tobacco and smoke gander's faeces.</i><i>This could be the health breakthrough of the century.</i><i>- Oh, yes.- In Galway.</i><i>- In County Galway, yeah. In Woodford.- Wow.</i><i>I think you've got to market that.</i><i>Yeah, I've got to start up my own business now.</i><i>As soon as I get the grant.</i> If you're wondering. No, that's not something they smoke in Woodford. And, yes, she was just having fun messing with me. Point is, this kind of thing happened to me all the time, all over Ireland. It's a country of storytellers just waiting for an excuse to drop a crazy, unexpected tale on you. So I was shocked to learn how long it took for them to really get to tell their own stories on screen. And for the rest of the world to finally listen up. I'm Rico Gagliano, welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the streaming service that champions great cinema. On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. Today, just in time for summer travel season, we kick off season eight. We are calling it 'Travelling Shots'. Every episode I'll take a tour through a different part of the planet to learn about its movie history, dive into its coolest cinema spaces, talk to a few of its best filmmakers, and remind us that wherever you go, film culture matters. Everywhere in the world, there needs places like this. They are the breeding grounds, the fertile soil of what is later called creative industry or culture. And also, I'll admit it, at a moment when a lot of borders and minds seem to be closing, I feel like it's never been more important to get out there, to listen and to learn about the whole wide world. So you'll be hearing people in places I taped over the last year in Mexico City, Amsterdam, Istanbul, the strange and exotic land of Los Angeles. And we're starting off today in Ireland, a place where for decades, filmmakers like superstar producer Ed Guiney battled against stereotypes. We used to say, I don't know if Americans will want to make our movies because they think we're like cute little fiddle playing creatures or whatever. But where today they're breaking all kinds of moulds. Some of the things that we say in the film are things that no one's ever said here. Like for instance? Well, I mean, "I want to blow you like a Brighton hotel" would probably be one. That's newly minted Irish citizen Rich Peppiatt, director of the stereotype smashing, boundary exploding movie <i>Kneecap</i>. And I talked to him, acting legend Fiona Shaw and many more about how this region of only like 7 million people has come to take global film culture by storm on its own terms. So prepare for takeoff. We're going to go check out Ireland's cinema scene, past and present. So you probably know the island of Ireland is divided, politically. There's the Republic of Ireland, which is part of the EU, and there's Northern Ireland, part of the UK. We're going to get to both in this episode, but I started with a tour of the Republic's movie history. It kicked off on a sunny, super festive March day in Dublin beside a statue of the unlikely godfather of Irish cinema. A guy better known as a local literary giant. Author James Joyce. So the James Joyce statue is located here on North Earl Street, almost city centre. Literally. That's Josh Newman. He is a curator at Dublin's James Joyce Institute. And as we gaze at the human sized statue version of Joyce, First thing I notice is... he doesn't look particularly happy. Yes, I've been trying to find a photo in which he smiles. I cannot find one. You know the most, maybe there's like a little smirk. Kind of like that. But yeah, he didn't like to smile. I should say. His teeth were terrible. He just had really awful teeth. So maybe he had a reason not to smile. Yeah. But just a few blocks away, past a street busker down a busy shopping avenue, Josh leads me to a spot where once stood maybe another reason for Joyce's perma-frown: the ill fated birthplace of Irish moviegoing. So we are standing in front of Penneys, a department store. What this used to be is the Volta Cinema or the Cinemagraph Volta that was established here December 20th, 1909 by James Joyce. This was Ireland's first movie theatre. Now, Joyce first fell in love with movies in Trieste, Italy, where he'd actually moved to escape Ireland. Hard to blame him. At the turn of the century, his homeland wasn't a great spot for artistic visionaries. Poor, kind of provincial, still ruled by Britain and dominated by the conservative Catholic Church. But Joyce hadn't published anything yet, and living in Trieste wasn't cheap, so... He thought to himself like, Dublin is a larger city than Trieste, and yet it doesn't have a movie theatre. So he decided to represent these investors who had some, a few movie theatres. And in Austro-Hungary, Bucharest, what have you. He took 10% of the profits by making the arrangements to set up a theatre here. Only problem, the Volta Cinema didn't make any profits. Apparently, the movies didn't do very well because that theatre showed mostly Italian films. Why did they only show Italian films? Because they were Italian investors. They owned the theatre, and I guess they didn't really think about that. Neither had Joyce. He liked Italian movies. For him, this was just further evidence of his homeland's isolation and closed mindedness. Two months after opening the Volta, he quit and headed back to Trieste. So I think, you know, Ireland does owe Joyce some gratitude in bringing cinema to Ireland, even if he kind of mishandled it. Still not a great start for Irish film culture. And even by the late 1940s, when the Irish Republic had got its independence and local movie palaces were wisely showing English language movies... things weren't great. In the early years of the state, there was no film production here. The country couldn't afford it. And also as a very conventionally Catholic country, the church was against Hollywood and it was against film. That's Ruth Barton, she is a professor of film studies at Dublin's Trinity College. And they thought Hollywood films were just filth. We had a very highly censored film exhibition sector, and they particularly hated kind of, you know, high kicking chorus girls. They even blamed the high level of female emigration on too much watching Hollywood movies. That women were leaving Ireland because they saw Hollywood movies, and they were like"Hey, I could be a showgirl. That would be fun." Yeah. That's right."Oh, wow. Look at the lives other people have. I'm out of here!" So, like, how much were movies censored? How bad was it? One of the very famous examples is <i>Gone With the Wind</i> where they cut the birth sequence. You couldn't show babies being born, right? That's dirty. So they cut the birth sequence. They cut any suggestion that there's an unhappy marriage at the centre of the film and they cut the film so rigorously that it fundamentally made no sense at all when you watched it. And so there was a kind of game of going to the movies and actually trying to work out what the plot of the story was. The society wasn't exactly encouraging film going, and therefore certainly not filmmaking. So, ironically... In the place of indigenous Irish filmmaking, you get Hollywood coming in and making things like <i>The Quiet Man</i>, for instance. Which came out in 1952 and really defined a vision of Irishness that ever since people have been responding to one way or another, whether they love it and want to reproduce it, or whether they hate it and want to do anything but <i>The Quiet Man</i>. Yeah, this would be a rom com directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne as an American who comes back to the little Irish village of his birth at first to buy his childhood cottage, and then to woo a fiery Irish gal who he first lays eyes on while she is literally herding sheep across a rolling field of emerald green.<i>Hey, is that real?</i><i>- She couldn't be.- Ah, nonsense, man.</i><i>It's only a mirage brought on by your terrible thirst.</i> It's Barry Fitzgerald playing the kind of Irish leprechaun. You've got these jolly, sort of singing, drinking, happy-go-lucky Irish villages where nobody works, everybody has a good time. Nobody needs to earn money.<i>It is a pleasant evening and we will have a drink.</i><i>There was a wild colonial boy</i><i>Jack Duggan was his name</i><i>He was born and bred in Ireland</i> And at the same time you get this celebration of Irish scenery. And <i>The Quiet Man</i> was shot in Technicolour, so it does look pretty stunning. The movie was an international hit, even with a lot of Irish audiences, who mostly took it as an enjoyable goof. Oh, I think that's probably, probably the best way to approach it. Not as a documentary. And if you go back to the reviews in the Irish papers, they're mostly saying, "Okay"John Ford was having a good time and this is a pretty funny film" but nobody's taking it seriously.

Except for two groups: 10:59

Ireland's tourism industry, which earned serious bank off a tourism boom after the movie, and the first wave of home-grown Irish filmmakers for whom <i>The Quiet Man</i> provided a set of stereotypes to be demolished. When you start to get an Irish film industry really in the 1970s, which started as a very kind of low budget avant garde, they were just appalled by this film. And I'm thinking of a film like, say, <i>Poitín</i> by Bob Quinn, which comes out in the 1970s. Yeah, <i>Poitín</i> is like the anti-Quiet Man. The story of a guy and his daughter making moonshine in the Irish boonies who get relentlessly harassed by a couple of thugs. It was tailor made not to be embraced by a Hollywood movie audience. From its dark story to its gritty colours and camerawork, even the dialogue was in Irish, a language a lot of Irish themselves didn't speak. John Ford's welcoming Emerald Isle this ain't. It's, you know, first ambition is to deconstruct those images and to present the West of Ireland as a lawless place filled with kind of nasty layabouts and drunks. This is a lot of what was getting made in the 70s and even into the 80s. Funded by tiny grants from the government's Arts Council, mainly getting screened at tiny private film societies. All of which was just fine with the filmmakers who flew right under the censors radar. And what they're showing, I think you've got to realise, wasn't being seen by the mainstream of people. So the Catholic Church wouldn't have cared if the intelligentsia went off and watched, you know, avant garde films. But meanwhile, a new kind of Irish movie was coming that was going to pull the film scene out of the underground. My name is Fiona Shaw, and I have been an actor for about 35 years. If you don't know the name, you definitely know the face of Fiona Shaw. Among her bajillions of roles, she was in the Harry Potter franchise playing Harry's Muggle aunt. Today, her homeland celebrates her as one of the greatest Irish actors ever. But back in '82, she started her career by leaving the country. Like millions had been doing since the famines of the 19th century. I mean, everybody, street sweepers, you know, everybody left Ireland. The population of Ireland in 1962 was 2.5 million people. You know, it was terrifying, having been, you know, 8 million or something before the famine. People left Ireland and left Ireland and left Ireland. And when it became the Republic, its economic policies were just disastrous. So people left, young people just left. But I left because I knew I couldn't be trained in Ireland. There was no film industry. I think in my mind I thought I'd go back to Ireland, but in the event I got taken up in London. She made a name for herself there as a stage star at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare, until she got a script for a movie being made back home. Directed by Jim Sheridan and based on a memoir by Irish writer and artist Christy Brown who grew up in working class 1950s era Dublin with cerebral palsy. It was called <i>My Left Foot</i>. You know, you have a retrospective view of the film. At the time, it was just a film and it was being made and I was being asked to be in it. And, you know, we all knew Christy Brown as a kind of folk hero. So it was a good subject. But I don't know what expectations anybody had of it, really. To be honest. Not many. Shaw says <i>My Left Foot</i>'s producer initially financed this period drama on his own credit card, and then by throwing fundraising dinners with Fiona and the films up and coming young star in attendance. Daniel Day-Lewis and I, you know, sat with Granada Television and had supper with them, and a whole lot of people talked and suddenly money appeared. I mean, it all took-- It was a hair's breath from not being made that film.<i>And the Oscar goes to Daniel Day-Lewis in</i> My Left Foot.<i>My Left Foot</i> did get made. Released in 1989, it was an international hit, won two Oscars.<i>You've just provided me with the makings of one hell of a weekend in Dublin.</i> And in Ireland... It changed film people's lives. You know, I remember vividly the Oscar nominations and wins that<i>My Left Foot</i> garnered, the excitement that that created here in Dublin. Today Ed Guiney is a three time Best Picture nominee himself, most recently for producing Yorgos Lanthimos <i>Poor Things</i>. But back then it was just an aspiring 20-something filmmaker. Remember staying up all night to watch it with a bunch of friends. And actually, it was very inspiring. The idea that an Irish made film could kind of reach those heights. Two years later came another home-grown smash, Neil Jordan's noir<i>The Crying Game</i>, set against a backdrop of Northern Ireland's sectarian Troubles. Like films in the 70s, these were authentic, even kind of gritty Irish stories. But this time told with a big Hollywood sweep, which Guiney says you can maybe chalk up to the same diaspora that had swept Fiona Shaw out of the country. Neil and Jim came out of a theatre tradition. They also, crucially, both of them lived abroad. They were emigrants. Jim to America, Neil to the UK. And when you live abroad and you're thinking about making films about Ireland, you're thinking about that in the context of being outside of Ireland and maybe how to communicate to people outside of Ireland. Like they both of them had a kind of an impulse to tell stories on a big stage. And thanks to them, other locals got a shot at making movies on that ambitious scale, because in 1993, Sheridan and Jordan's success convinced the government to beef up and relaunch a film fund that had been dormant for years. Screen Ireland. Which meant that there was actually state investment in the film industry, and that has been a factor for the last 30 years. Now here, you know, if you're a young filmmaker from anywhere in the country, there are so many ways in. There's so much support and so many programs. So many of the things that are taken for granted nowadays in Ireland were absolutely unimaginable 40 years ago. Including filmmakers just having fun. My name is John Crowley, and I'm a film director. You sure are. John Crowley is one of my favourite directors, actually, ever since his gorgeous Oscar nominated immigrant movie<i>Brooklyn</i> with Saoirse Ronan. But when he was a kid, having a film career was a pipe dream. To be involved in that world, it really did feel as likely to me growing up in Cork as it would be, you know, joining NASA. It just felt like a whole other world that you were never going to sort of get to touch the hem of, let alone get involved in. And I think that shifted in everybody's head with Neil and Jim. That'd be Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan, of course. But by 2003, when Crowley made his movie directing debut, he sensed it was time to make way different kind of films. Much as I revered Neil and Jim, I wasn't trying to do anything like what they did. And in a way, quite consciously trying to not make an Irish film which was trying to be an American film, you know, if anything, it ran in the opposite direction to carve out its own space.<i>What kind of fuckhead are you? That pisses me all the way off, man.</i> Written by playwright Mark O'Rowe it was called <i>Intermission</i>, a comedy about a bunch of modern day young Dubliners falling in and out of relationships, jobs and trouble with the law. Like there's the guy who hasn't had sex in so long he can't even masturbate anymore.<i>Half an hour, 45 minutes. Nothing fucking happens.</i><i>Can't get my fantasies clear in my head.</i> And there's a two bit thief who's so to bit his own ex-girlfriend complains his biggest score was stealing a giant crate of savoury brown sauce from a grocery store, which he now eats in everything.<i>I'd be over at his place</i><i>he's making sauce sandwiches. Putting it in his cornflakes,</i><i>trying to use it all up. in his tea!</i> It wasn't a great historical subject matter. It was far more immediate. And it was about people being late to work and working in supermarkets and, you know, foul mouthed kids. And the characters were completely absorbed in their own dilemmas, not in their own Irishness. In fact, the one character who sort of is into his Irishness we're meant to laugh at. A self-loathing rogue cop who's way too into 70s Irish folk rock.<i>Artistes like Fainne Lasta, Raithneach, Clannad.</i><i>You like them artistes? Their music?</i><i>And of course you do.</i> Finally, Irish movies didn't have to be about the country's history or identity. They didn't have to be a reaction to Hollywood or an embrace of it. They could just be a cool ride through modern life in a modern place.<i>Intermission</i> was the biggest home-grown indie hit in Irish history. My nephew started quoting lines from the film and he said,"Yeah, all the kids in my class talk about it." And that at that point felt it, okay... And the brown sauce thing took off. The whole idea of putting brown sauce in your tea. And I think that captured the imagination of the country at the time, that everybody felt like they knew somebody who would do something as ridiculous as that, really. But from the 70s through the 90s, as the Republic of Ireland moved towards that relaxed state of mind... just a couple hours drive and a border away in Northern Ireland, things were way different. Right, you want to introduce yourself, and what you do. My name is Pat and I'm a full time tour guide. In the Northern Irish capital of Belfast. You can hire cabbies like Pat McMullan to take you on a driving tour of what I would call a living monument to PTSD. Neighbourhoods where for decades residents have divided themselves by religion and politics. Protestant Loyalists on one side who want Northern Ireland to stay part of the UK, and Catholic Republicans on the other who want it to unite with the Irish Republic. For years, starting in the 60s, the two tribes waged war. It was called the Troubles, and even today, so-called peace walls between them still run through sections of Belfast. You're going to be driving through walls and large gates, which divides the communities, and those gates will be closing tonight at 9 p.m. Still today, there are 43 walls in the city what keeps the two communities apart. No need for them today, but if you have a comfort blanket for over 50 years, you don't want to give it up.- It's purely about feeling secure.- Yeah, feeling secure. And the biggest wall you have is inside your head. That is the biggest wall you have. How did a film culture grow in a place like this? It's happened in some unexpected ways. That's coming up in just a minute. Stay with us. Okay, everybody MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are and in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theatres. Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers. We have always got something new for you to discover. And hey, coming up in the next act, we are going to be talking about how Irish language movies have become all the rage. So let me urge you to discover the latest example thereof: it is a movie called <i>Bring Them Down</i>. From award winning director Christopher Andrews. It stars Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan you'll remember him from <i>Saltburn</i> and also Christopher Abbott from <i>Poor Things</i>. He plays a shepherd living with his ailing dad out in the Irish countryside, who gets caught up in a conflict with a rival farmer and his, let's say, unhinged son. And then things escalate. This thing is a gripping revenge thriller. It kind of rips apart the trope of the strong, silent type. Powerful stuff, and it's exclusively on MUBI in the US, UK, Ireland, of course, and many other countries. Head to mubi.com to subscribe and start watching. As always, you can find all the links and info you need in the show notes of this episode. Meanwhile, let's get back to it. So, as Pat McMullan drives us around one of the Catholic Republican neighbourhoods in Belfast, the day goes from sunny to cold and grey. Feels appropriate as he hands me a ring binder full of black and white photos of the area from back in the height of the Troubles. It was a war zone. checkpoints, metal skeletons of bombed out cars. He says out in the countryside where he lived, there was way less conflict. But still... At the end of the day, nowhere and Northern Ireland was 100% safe. Nowhere was. Let me ask you this, so was there cinema going?- Were people going to the movies?- Yes, cinema. This is hard to believe. I lived in the countryside, I always had a nice new car. But when I was going to the cinema, I took an old builder's van with me. So they didn't break into or steal me car. They wouldn't steal your car. You just took some hunk of junk with you. When you basically came into town'cause it was dangerous. That was it, yeah. Bombs went off outside cinemas. People got caught in shootouts as they filed out after a movie. The Queen's Film Theatre in the south of Belfast, away from the fighting, became a kind of neutral ground. And it survives today. But a lot more closed. At one point in 1974, a local paper reported you could leave Belfast and drive through town after town for 70 miles without finding a movie theatre. And Trinity College's Ruth Barton says professional movie making was hobbled for decades. Not least because the Troubles, you know, don't end until the end of the 1990s. And nobody would have got insurance to film in the North, or particularly if they went to film in Belfast, wasn't possible. And any film that was set in Belfast was was actually filmed in Dublin or elsewhere. But then two big events started turning things around. Here's the first.<i>Good evening. Within the last few minutes,</i><i>the parties involved in the Northern Ireland peace talks</i><i>have reached an agreement.</i> In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement ended most of the violence.<i>Is there a palpable sense of excitement?</i><i>There is, of course. I mean, this is new territory for all of us.</i><i>There are journalists here,</i><i>there are cameramen here are terribly emotional about what they've seen here.</i><i>Men and women who have spent their careers covering the Troubles.</i><i>They're seeing something good come out of this.</i> And then, of course, the huge thing that happened to Northern Ireland was <i>Game of Thrones</i>. Yeah, in 2004, in what feels like a symbolic farewell to bad times, an old Belfast hangar where the actual Titanic got its first paint job was repurposed as a film studio. And in 2010, yeah, the creators of HBO's epic fantasy series <i>Game of Thrones</i> made it their main location. They also shot at picturesque spots all over Northern Ireland for ten years. And that suddenly produced a whole infrastructure that had to develop in order to be able to make <i>Game of Thrones</i>. And so, you know, you get studios being developed, you get soundstages being built you get people being trained, you get actors getting opportunities that they would not have had before. And it was <i>Game of Thrones</i> that really transformed things. And that's when local filmmakers started reckoning with a new challenge. What would it look like now for them to put Northern Ireland stories on screen? So one of the things that you have to sort of ask yourself is at the end of the Troubles, how do you tell the story of the Troubles? How do you make films that seem authentic, that are set in Northern Ireland, and how do you negotiate the legacy of the Troubles when you do that? Yeah, because on the one hand, it's kind of like, oh, all anybody thinks of us as the Troubles and we're more than that. But on the other hand, it does seep into everything.- So how can you escape it?- That's right. And people are still defined by their religion in the North, so, you know, you can't get away from it. But then you get a few things happening, like the success of <i>Derry Girls</i>, right? The TV series <i>Derry Girls</i>, which was just a massive hit.<i>A new school can seem like a very scary place.</i> Set in the 90s, the <i>Derry Girls</i> is a 2018 sitcom about a set of aggressively oddball Northern Irish Catholic school teens who are dealing with typical petty, horny teen girl stuff. But in a world where, like their school bus gets stopped and search for bombs by British soldiers.- <i>Everyone remain seated.</i>- One of whom they find kinda hot.<i>- What's going on?- I don't know.</i><i>But do you think if I told him I had an incendiary device</i><i>down my knickers, he'd have a look?</i> And it was made by local people. It starred local actors. And it was a very local story that was sort of about the Troubles, but more about growing up and the Troubles and the Troubles were sort of slightly outside of its range, but just always there. Yeah, it colours the comedy rather than being about it. Yeah, it's not about it, but it comes in and out, right. And so I think <i>Derry Girls</i> was really important. In the 2010s there were movies like this too blackly comic or sometimes even joyous stories set in the Troubles, but about people living their lives despite them. And then just last year came a comedy set in the modern day, about a trio of young Belfast guys who were barely alive for the Troubles but rail about living in the aftermath using their own special language. Literally. My name is Rich Peppiatt and I'm the writer and director of <i>Kneecap</i>. I visited Rich at his Belfast home in a neighbourhood not far from the peace walls. He moved here seven years back after marrying an Irish woman, and right away stumbled on his story. I think within two weeks of moving into this very house that we are sitting in now. I went to a gig that was happening, you know, half a mile down the road from here at a bar called Limelight, where a local hip hop act called Kneecap were playing. And I'm a big fan of hip hop. And I thought, well, you know, local hip hop act let's do that. And I was just blown away. Their stage presence, their energy. And more than that, there was 500 or so young people in the crowd who were rapping back to them in Irish, every word of their songs. And to me, that was, as a man just come over from London, was quite the revelation that there was this young, vibrant Irish language community. That's because at the time the Irish language had become a political football. Northern Irish Republicans were pushing to get it recognised as an official language of the state. For instance, putting it on signage right alongside the Queen's English. While pro-British Loyalist politicians were like almost no one here even speaks Irish. You're just trying to make this place less British. The problem isn't the Irish language, it is the politicisation of that language. But at the Limelight, as Rich watched Kneecap spit anti-British rhymes in Irish. It didn't feel like some dead relic of a language, it felt like a political rally crossed with an off the chain party. Here was these three guys really at the forefront of it all, but in a really intriguing way, because they were throwing bags of white powder into the crowd and, you know, getting their arse out with "Brits Out" written across it and generally just being absolute madmen. An unexpected movement led by very unexpected guys, which convinced Kneecap to star in a fictionalised biopic of their own lives that ended up making a big, real world impact. It's the story of two Catholic friends, Liam Óg and Naoise, who are bonded by a love of petty crime, all night raves and outrage at the sectarian politics that still rule their Northern Irish lives. Like on one hand, Naoise resents his Republican ex-paramilitary dad, played by Michael Fassbender, the guy who's been in hiding since the Troubles.<i>You bring a stolen car here, here.</i> And disses his kids choices whenever they meet.<i>You're putting the whole operation at risk.</i><i>- Cén operation?- Every day I am not captured</i><i>is a psychological victory against the occupiers.</i><i>That's the operation.</i> But the two friends reserve most of their anger for said British occupiers. They join forces with a local Irish language teacher cum DJ to get loaded and pump out protest raps."C.E.A.R.T.A." the Irish word for rights. Their tunes help fuel pro-Irish language, anti-Loyalist protests even as Liam falls for a Loyalist girl whose idea of dirty sex talk is to interrogate him like a political prisoner.<i>That's right. Confess.</i><i>- Confess!- Never!</i><i>Spill your secrets inside me, you Fenian cunt!</i> In other words, like the band, the movie takes every expectation or taboo anyone ever had about Northern Ireland and blows it to pieces. There's a lot of sacred cows here, and Kneecap have always been very good, one of the things I love about them is they've always kind of like rode roughshod over those sacred cows and made jokes about them. Some of the things that we say in the film are things that no one's ever said here and would-- Like, for instance? Well, I mean, I want to blow you like a Brighton hotel would probably be one.<i>Don't you dare cum!</i><i>I want to blow you like a Brighton hotel.</i> That'd be Liam's girlfriend again, referencing the time back in 1984 when Republicans tried to assassinate UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by, yeah, blowing up a hotel in Brighton. There was not a single funder on this film that wanted that line in there. I came under immense pressure to take that line out. You can see where the band's boundary demolition could get him in the kind of trouble they landed in just a couple of months ago, when London's Metropolitan Police brought Liam up on terrorism charges for brandishing a Hezbollah flag on stage. But amazingly, back when the movie hit cinemas, instead of triggering a backlash, it was a hit in Ireland and Britain. Maybe 'cause it was helmed by a guy with feet in both. I think if you're from here, you can't help but be seen, and there's probably a bit of truth in it, as well, as having some sort of slant. You're either from one side or the other and it's very difficult-- No one's really neutral, right? And I think maybe in a way it would have been hard for an Irish man or woman to have made the film because it would have been seen as there's an axe to grind. There's an agenda. And I was sort of seen more as a neutral party. In that way, it's kind of the ultimate post-Troubles movie. And it joined at least one other film that's made the Irish language and Irish cinema go viral. You know, the Kneecap story is amazing of just these guys in the North that are a couple of headers, really. Rebekah Guilar, aka Becks, is a Belfast native who helps host the storytelling event series Seanchoiche and its offshoot podcast <i>In Their Shoes</i>. But they... but they love the Irish language, like even the sound of it, and make it something that everyone kind of wants to know now. And that was not the way it was ten years ago. It was an old thing that you felt like, why am I even learning this? Because no one's using it. But now, through the way that they bring it into their music, and the context has made people be like,"Oh, this is actually quite cool." This year, a survey of Irish students found 70% of them suddenly love and want to learn Irish. There's a boom in new learners all the way over in Australia. Teachers are calling it the Kneecap effect, but Rich Peppiatt gladly admits the band and the movie aren't solely responsible. You know, <i>An Cailín Ciúin</i>,<i>The Quiet Girl</i> was a film that was a great inspiration to us. You know, people talk about Kneecap like it was the first big Irish language film but no, we were standing on the shoulders of <i>An Cailín Ciúin</i>. And it was funny 'cause when we were first developing the film, there's a scheme here called Cine4, which is the Irish language channel, their cinema scheme, they fund the film up to $1 million. And we applied for that and we thought we were going to get it, arrogantly. We were like, there's no way we're not going to get this'cause, you know, kneecap are basically the biggest Irish language thing since, I don't know, ever really. And so it was like, right... And then we got knocked back and there was a film called<i>An Cailín Ciúin</i> that got it instead. And we were like,<i>The Quiet Girl</i>? Who the fuck wants to watch a film about a quiet girl when you've got three loud rappers? This is bullshit. This is absolute-- And then we actually saw the film and we were like, yeah, it's all right, actually.<i>The Quiet Girl</i> released in 2022, shares a language with Kneecap, but not much else. It was made in the Irish Republic and tells the simple story of a poor, kind of neglected girl who spends a summer with a distant cousin and her husband, who come to truly love her. Just thinking of it brings a tear to my eye, and apparently to a lot of peoples, it's the highest grossing Irish language film ever. Hi, my name is Carrie Crowley. I am an Irish actor, and a lot of my work happens to be in Irish, in the Irish language,<i>as Gaeilge</i>. Carrie Crowley starred in the movie as the empathetic cousin. Like much of her Irish language work,<i>The Quiet Girl</i> was partly funded by the Republic's Irish language TV channel, which has a rep for bold, beautiful stuff not always seen by huge audiences, though.<i>The Quiet Girl</i> stood out from the jump. I knew literally as soon as I read the script I wanted I so badly wanted to do it. I loved it, and like I wept so many times during that, making it, reading it. And then it started to get release. And it was the longest running film, not Irish film, and certainly not Irish language film, it was the longest running film ever in the Irish Film Institute at a certain point in time. And to me, that was extraordinary. This was a film in the Irish language. You know, when you first started getting into the business and first started making Irish language cinema, would you have expected this, that the two biggest films of recent years out of Ireland would be in the in the Irish language? No, I would never have imagined it. It's like one of those, you know,"If you could have one dream,"what would it be?" We would never, well I would never have thought that that was a possibility. Not least of all because even in the Gaeltacht, the slivers of Ireland where a majority speak the language, it wasn't always embraced. There was a time when, for those who lived in the Gaeltacht, they kind of wanted to sound like they spoke English more than Irish, so they would kind of throw the Irish to one side in case it made them look lesser. Now, who brought that idea into the country or who put that idea into people's heads? It should never have happened. But now there's much more pride, and there's a much younger contingent who are happily speaking the language. And I mean, when it comes to movies, at least, there's definitely lots for the Irish to be proud of right now. In 2023, more than three decades after <i>My left Foot</i> won its Oscar Ireland had another big night.<i>The Quiet Girl</i> became the first Irish language movie to get a nomination. It was for Best International Film. Same year, four of the ten nominees in the Male Actor categories were Irish, which Ruth Barton reminds me, is just a fraction of the Irish superstar's out there. You could just start listing now and we could be here for the rest of the evening. But you know, it starts with Pierce Brosnan Daniel Day-Lewis and so on. And then you're going right up to, you know, people like Barry Keoghan, Brendan Gleeson, the Gleesons, in fact, Domhnall Gleeson, Brian Gleeson, there's a you know, there are many Gleeson's and of course, Paul Mescal, who became so big after <i>Normal People</i>. Cillian Murphy. Oh yeah, speaking of him, the next year, 2024, this happened.<i>And the Oscar goes to Cillian Murphy.</i> That also be the year the Ed Guiney produced <i>Poor Things</i> was up for Best Picture, and the year <i>Kneecap</i> became the first Irish language movie to premiere at Sundance, won the audience award there, and then racked up a slew of BAFTAs. Right now... I'm a very proud Irish man standing here tonight, so. Ireland's screen storytellers have definitely seized the microphone. I'm going to wrap things up, appropriately enough, in an Irish cinema. These days, Ireland's got one of the highest movie attendance rates per capita in all of Europe. And in the airy, modern lobby of the Lighthouse Cinema in Dublin, I get a glimpse of maybe why. It seems like they get in the habit young. Hordes of high schoolers stream around me, all of them here, to analyse movies as part of their public school curriculum. The teachers bring them here to watch them. It's the best experience they can get from them and they can have discussions afterwards. David Kelly is a programmer at The Lighthouse. Mostly it's curriculum based, English curriculum, so a lot of <i>Hamlet</i> and <i>Macbeth</i> and stuff like that, you know, three hour versions as well. So the students are very much in it for the long haul, some mornings, yeah. They're like, "Oh no, the Branagh <i>Hamlet</i>. Not that!" Dave and I escape the noise by ducking into an empty screening room, along with the lighthouse's head of cinema, Alice Black. I want to know what movies bring in big audiences these days at this Irish arthouse. Turns out, it's mostly what you'd expect. David Lynch retrospectives, you know the drill. Also, of course... I mean, <i>A Quiet Girl</i>. We're still kind of trying to dissect what happened with <i>The Quiet Girl</i>. It was just incredible, you know? I mean, it's a huge box office phenomenon in Ireland. Huge. Absolutely huge. We played it for almost a year. But then Alice told me this. So we have a huge Brazilian population here in Dublin and we're we're seeing, you know, a lot of interest in Brazilian titles. With <i>I'm Still Here</i> we saw, I mean, the opening weekend of that was the biggest weekend we've ever had at lighthouse.<i>I'm Still Here</i> is of course, the Best Picture nominee from last year, Brazil's first ever. And yeah, thanks to a growing population of Brazilians who come to study and then stay in Dublin... It was bigger than <i>Barbie</i> or <i>Oppenheimer</i>. It was absolutely massive with the most people we had through the door ever. We were overwhelmed by the amount of tickets that were being sold for that film. We were absolutely flabbergasted. Like it was, it was crazy. A century ago, no one in town would go to a foreign film at the Volta. Today, here in the middle of Dublin, the weekend box office champ is from Brazil. It makes me wonder what language the next wave of Irish cinema might be in, and whether somewhere, James Joyce is finally smiling. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us this season as I touch down in cities all over the globe. Next week, I learn why my favourite city is a great place to watch movies, but hasn't always been a great place to make them. What is amazing about Dutch people is that they are so bluntly honest, but for art, that's not good for stories, that's boring. It's the film scene of Amsterdam featuring the bluntly honest director of <i>Baby Girl</i>, Helena Reine. Follow us wherever you listen so you don't miss it. Meanwhile, let's roll credits. This episode of the MUBI Podcast was written, hosted, and edited by me Rico Gagliano. Ciara McEniff is our producer. She booked this episode, along with Jackson Musker. Kat Kowalczyk is our assistant producer. Mastering by Steven Colon. Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick with the additional track 'Blueprint' by Jahzzar, courtesy of Tribe of Noise. Extra. Thanks this week to Simon Bird for recording Ed Guiney and Fiona Shaw. Gaff of Seanchoíche, everyone at Lighthouse Cinema, Niall and Miriam McEniff, and Robert McInerney. The show is executive produced by me along with Efe Çakarel Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. If you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen, won't you? Let them know we're not your standard chat show. Also, if you've got questions, comments, or you want to question our sanity for trying to squeeze a century of Irish history into 45 minutes or whatever, email us at podcast@mubi.com And of course, to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast, just head over to MUBI.com to start watching. Thanks for listening, go watch some movies and travel tip always carry aspirin and chewing gum on you when you fly.