Language and the role it plays in shaping identity was a driving theme for writer-director Rich Peppiatt when he embarked on making Kneecap, Ireland’s official submission for the International Feature Oscar race this year.
The film, set in post-Troubles Belfast, follows three hedonistic Irish language speakers who form real-life hip-hop group Kneecap and become the unlikely figureheads of a civil rights movement to save their mother tongue. It follows Belfast schoolteacher JJ and rappers Naoise and Liam Og as they rap in their native Irish language, overcoming police, paramilitaries and politicians who try to silences their defiant sound.
“It was about trying to understand why the language is so important to them,” Peppiatt said during a panel for the film at Deadline’s Contenders Film: International awards-season showcase. “Because choosing to live your life through such a minority language – one that only 6,000 people speak in the north of Ireland – it’s not an easy thing to do. So, I wanted to understand why it means so much to them.”
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Peppiatt continued: “It’s not a written language – it’s an oral language, so it’s passed down through music and poetry and storytelling. And suddenly once you started learning all of that and learning the language, you realize that Kneecap were just the latest in a canon of storytellers stretching back thousands and thousands of years and they were reinventing the way they told these stories.
“No longer was it a harp and a fiddle. They were doing it through an American form of music, music of resistance and a form of rebellion and they were choosing hip-hop. That, to me, what just a lovely revelation to see them in that context and I think whatever the legacy that they leave behind through their music, through the film, it’s the impression they’ve made on the language itself.”
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When approaching the film, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year before being picked up by Sony Pictures Classics, Peppiatt felt that the biopic genre was becoming “quite tired” and was keen to approach this film in a way that would chronicle the rise of the band in real time.
“We thought what would it be like if you were to do a biopic that was almost in real time, where you’re following the rise of a band,” he said. “Is it even possible? Is that even a thing and how would that come about? So, Kneecap just felt like the perfect petri dish to test that theory.”
He added: “None of us could have believed that the serendipity of the film coming out at Sundance in January as the same year as their debut album. So, it really has been a biopic playing out in real time as this revolutionary musical act grows from force to force.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
