Belfast
How bad do things need to get for a family to decide to leave a beloved town, let alone a country?As someone from a country that’s seen one of the worst migrant crises of this generation, I have often found myself having conversations about what was happening right before and during a person’s decision to leave. So often, it’s chronic stress and hopelessness. People’s threshold, however, varies. Some get there almost as an overreaction, deciding to leave before things get bad. For others, that point never arrives, either never leaving no matter what, or only leaving when forced — no decision actively made.
My mother was in the first group. She had little hope for the future of our country when — arguably — there were still reasons to hope. Her chronic stress was less that of living through a collapsing society, but the more mundane pain of being a highly-educated, yet underpaid professional in a society not particularly prone to respecting or properly compensating women. Compared to all the tragedies that befell Venezuela after we left, it’s hard not to marvel at how strange it was for her to make us immigrate at that point, but also, at how right she was proven to be in the long run.
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She was right, which is only too bad.
Leaving Venezuela is still one of the the most painful, and best things to ever have happened to me. Endlessly enriched by the experience, there’s also a part of me that’s stuck — haunted by an enshrined memory of Mérida in 1999, and by the entirely gocha 12-year-old girl unburdened still by hyphens, accents, and otherness. Even when I recall that one of my first memories is a coup d’etat, or the times when tear gas got into our house, it is still hard for me not to focus on the chaotic beauty of a childhood in a troubled place where I felt a profound sense of belonging.
That was a long way for me to say, that Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast (2021) resonated with me on a very personal level. Not what I expected when I decided to watch a movie by that name, set in 1969. I found myself relating to a story of a family being pushed to leave a home they love because the chaos got to be too much.
On paper Belfast should feel derivative and foreign: yet another film about a filmmaker’s childhood (in this case with Roma overtones, another 21st-century, black-and-white memory piece). Yet, the film wound up being one of those examples of how the most personal of experiences are often the most universal.
