One of our favourite films this year is Kneecap, a funny, raucous and heartfelt music biopic unlike any other.
It chronicles the beginnings of Northern Irish hip-hop group Kneecap, composed of Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara and DJ Próvaí – who also released their debut album ‘Fine Art’ this year. The band use the Irish language to tackle socio-political issues and are unlike anything you’ve ever heard.
English writer-director and former journalist Rich Peppiatt teamed up with the three rappers for his feature debut, a fictionalised origin story / docudrama that tells the story about growing up in post-Troubles Belfast. With the rappers playing themselves, no less.
The band uses lyrics to directly protest the English rule of Northern Ireland and the suppression of their linguistic heritage; the film uses the band to tell the importance of preserving indigenous languages and cultures threatened by colonisation.
The film is not only one of the most exciting music biopics in years – we said it understands that “smarts and laughs needn’t be mutually exclusive” in our review – but also became the first Irish language film to ever screen at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. There, it won the Audience Award, and since then, bagged seven British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) – including Best British Independent Film – and is Ireland’s pick for Best International Feature at next year’s Oscars.
Talk about the foul-mouthed film that could.
Euronews Culture caught up with Rich Peppiatt at this year’s European Film Awards to talk about his mad year and the gambit of an Englishman telling this unique story.
Euronews Culture: It’s been one hell of a year for the actual band Kneecap, but also for you – your first feature film debuting at Sundance, a film ending up being the biggest Irish opening for an Irish-language film ever, and Ireland’s nomination for Best International Feature for the Oscars next year. How has this a whirlwind year been for you?
Rich Peppiatt: I mean, if Carlsberg did years then 2024 would be mine, I suppose! Other beer brands are available. (Laughs) But yeah, it’s certainly something that we didn’t expect. The debut in Sundance was in itself something that exceeded our expectations. When I met the band, they were a local act who were rapping in a language that not many people spoke… They weren’t signed, and never released an album. It didn’t exactly scream blockbuster material, right? So it was always kind of a left-field project. We’ve been really gratified that is a film that’s so specific in its telling but has found a universal audience all around the world.
You saw the band for the first time in 2019, right?
That’s right.
What was it about them that grabbed you from the get-go?
Well, the thing that jumped out immediately was them throwing baggies of white powder into the crowd. That grabbed my attention! (Laughs) They clearly had an attitude of ‘we don’t care what anyone thinks’. And I think that was quite refreshing in the sense that it felt like a lot of music was very PR’d and packaged, and they sort of harked back to a sex, drugs and rock’n’roll era of just causing mayhem!
Beyond that, there were 800 or so young people who were in that crowd who were rapping back to them every word in Irish. And to me, as someone who lives in Belfast, even I wasn’t aware that there was a young, vibrant Irish-language community. I thought, well, if I don’t realize that, then there must be millions of people who don’t realize that either. As a filmmaker, when you find a precinct that feels like it’s not had a camera put on it, that’s perhaps the start of a story.
So, you live in Belfast, and if I’m not mistaken, you’re married to an Irish woman…
That’s right, for my sins!
Was it still daunting, as an Englishman, telling this story? Because I’m half French and half Brit, and when watching the film, there was a part of me that said: ‘Oh, shit – I’m the oppressor…’
(Laughs) Yeah, it didn’t do me any massive favours when I approached the band as an English fella. And they were a little bit suspicious at first. My wife’s from the same area as them in Belfast, and that sort of added a veneer of legitimacy. They were like, ‘Well, if he’s married to a West Belfast redhead, then he can probably be able to handle us!’ (Laughs)
But I think actually not being from Belfast helped because it is a place that is still riven by division and if you’re born there, you grow up there, and it’s very hard to escape some of those prejudices and beliefs… So someone coming in who has more of a sort of drone’s eye view of the whole situation can kind of, in a way, shoot for both sides. The comedy was able to attack everyone with equal opportunities. And I think there are a lot of sacred cows in Belfast, where you’re not allowed to say certain things and a lot of things are hidden in silence. Because in my own ignorance I didn’t really see that, and I think the band really got behind that. They were like, ‘I can’t believe you’ve written that joke – I’m gonna blow you like a Brighton hotel’, and I was like, ‘I think it’s quite funny!’ (Laughs) For the record, there was a lot of pressure to remove that joke. I just refused to!
I’m glad you managed to keep it in. Which brings me to the genre of the film, as the music biopic genre is ubiquitous to the point of oversaturation. One of the things I love about Kneecap is how it mirrors the band’s irreverence, but also challenges and subverts the expectations of the music biopic. That being said, were there any music films that did inspire you?
Well, The Commitments is the classic Irish music film, and anytime you’re doing a music film in Ireland, people reference that. But I think that I felt very much the same as you, that the biopic genre had been run over a thousand times and it was very generic and paint-by-numbers. I’d had an idea for a few years about what is a completely different way to approach a music biopic, rather than at the end of someone’s career looking back, with rose-tinted spectacles… Could it be done in real-time? Could you do it with a band on the rise rather than on the decline? And what would that even be? It does create problems, because they haven’t done the things which are part of the story yet. And it weirdly worked out amazingly well because the film came out the same summer as the band’s debut album, so that serendipity was something that really worked.
Now, if we try that again with a different band, it would probably fall flat on its face. And part of that is because you’re a local, unsigned act – there’s thousands of them around. Every town and city has got them, and a lot of the time people break up, they don’t get better, or they just plateau and get on with their lives and do something else. That was always a risk with Kneecap, but I did feel from a very early stage that there was something about them – that je ne sais quoi, you know? I thought, ‘You know what, I think they’re going to be big.’ And it’s been a pleasure to be part of that journey. Especially because I’ve got no musical talent whatsoever, so being the fifth Beatle to them is quite fun!
It’s great how you balance humour with some incredibly serious things in Kneecap – whether it’s the ceasefire generation, police, drugs, or even the ills of streaming during that trippy claymation sequence… But the film also deals with the fragility of language and the preservation of culture. There’s that impactful reminder / warning at the end of the film that states that one indigenous language dies every 40 days. As you said, there’s a universality to this. How have people reacted to this while you’ve been touring the film?
It wasn’t a statistic that I was conscious of when we set out to make the film. Once we were chugging along, I realized that there was a much bigger story that had to do with indigenous language and culture. We live in a world where increasingly the hegemony of English is making people more monolingual. And that doesn’t enrich us as a humanity because once a language is gone, it’s gone forever. There’s no way of getting it back. It’s almost like destroying the environment. You can’t suddenly go, ‘Oh, can we just rewind this?’ Once the language is gone, there’s no one left to pass it on. It’s done. And we lose then a sense of who we are, our history and our culture.
I think where the band Kneecap are really important in that conversation is that there is no economic value to speaking Irish. There’s often this idea: ‘Learn a language because it will somehow allow you to progress in your career.’ But they say there’s absolutely no economic value to speaking Irish, but what there is a cultural value. There’s a sense of connecting with yourself, with your heritage… It’s a very poetic language – it’s connecting yourself with the land, with nature… And when talking to people while touring the film, people are connecting with this idea, saying: ‘I should go and learn my history, my heritage, because it broadens me as a person.’
Speaking of recent history, the band recently won a discrimination battle against the UK government. (Then-Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch denied the band music funding.)The whole thing was another reminder that oppression takes many forms and still persists between England and Northern Ireland, even in 2024. Big question, I know, but from your point of view as a Brit living in Belfast – and for audiences who are alien to these tensions – why do these prejudices and aggressions continue to persist?
Specifically with that case, it was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard a government minister do, in that she (Kemi Badenoch) came out and said that we don’t want to give these people the money because we don’t believe in what they believe in. And under the Good Friday Agreement, and under just discrimination law, if you have a lawfully held belief, you can’t be discriminated against because of that. There’s lots of things people say all the time that I don’t like, but it doesn’t mean you can tell them not to say it, right? She made she made a real idiot of herself, and so it was always an open and slam case, really.
But to your wider point, the tension between Ireland and England, mainly, will exist until a day when the issue of this part of Ireland, this northern corner of it being owned effectively by another nation, is properly addressed. If you were an alien who fell out of a spaceship and landed on Earth, and you were asked to take a judgment on it… There’s an island here, and there’s a little bit of it there that’s owned by this country over here. Whose should it really be? We can say, ‘Well, it’s part of that country there because it’s one single island, right?’ And I think it’s as simple as that. Everything else is kind of the rubbish that has built up over the years. But it’s really that simple – and that imperialism is something that we’re starting to address more and more…
We saw it this year with the Chagos Islands…
Yeah, these places around the world which are nowhere near the homeland, if you want to call it that. I think we are starting to address that a bit, but there’s a lot of resistance to that. I also understand that there are people in the north of Ireland who believe themselves to be British and want to be British, and they were born there. They’ve got every right to feel that way. It is a difficult situation and you can’t just say, ‘Oi, sod off’, right? I hope that there will be a solution where we will have a united Ireland that will be representative of everyone’s belief. But we’ve got some challenges to get there.
I’m being told we have to end it there – sorry for ending on such a weighty question!
(Laughs) You’re alright! We can talk about it after the ceremony tonight!
Check out extracts from our interview with Rich Peppiatt in the video at the top of this article.
