By Lucy Spicer
One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Festival is having a front-row seat for the bright future of independent filmmaking. While we can learn a lot about the filmmakers from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival through the art that these storytellers share with us, there's always more we can learn about them as people. This year, we decided to get to the bottom of those artistic wells with our ongoing series: Give Me the Backstory!
The director of Kneecap knows how to take his own advice. Ignore the people who tell you, That's not how X and Y is done.' Maybe that's just not how it was done until you showed up, says Rich Peppiatt, whose film about real-life Irish band Kneecap premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Musicians - especially musicians with no acting experience - don't typically play themselves in biopics, but Peppiatt took a chance. And the gamble was a big one. According to Peppiatt, the most challenging part of the whole project was getting three musicians who'd never acted to a place where they could share scenes with the likes of Michael Fassbender and it not feel to audiences like they were only there because they'd won a raffle.
But the gamble paid off, and the result is a frenetic, wild ride of a film that took home the Audience Award: NEXT at the Festival. Kneecap gives us the Belfast hip-hop group's origin story, involving a chance meeting between teacher JJ Dochartaigh and misfits Liam g hAnnaidh and Naoise Caireall in that leads to the trio recording some high-energy tracks with unapologetically Irish lyrics destined to draw crowds of fans and critics alike.
Read on to learn more about Peppiatt, including how the director first got into filmmaking and what kind of audience he hopes to reach with Kneecap.
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By Lucy Spicer
