Sir, – I can understand John Curran's concerns about Kenneth Branagh's film Belfast (Letters, February 7th), but I feel that it's not that he has grasped the wrong end of the stick, but that he has grasped the wrong stick. He has confused verisimilitude with truth. Belfast is not a documentary, it is not a history. It is a story – a story about a nine-year-old boy, his family, his neighbours , his street, and the year (1969).
Truth lies in the emotional telling of this story, and it is a truth well expressed in the film. A documentary has a different purpose with different objectives which, it would seem, are admirably met in the Patrick Kielty documentaries referred to in Mr Curran’s letter. I acknowledge his observations about the presence of a Sikh corner-store owner in the Belfast of 1969 and other “jarring messages” (to use his words). Then I recall that errors by Shakespeare in giving Bohemia a coastline in The Winter’s Tale, a clock that strikes in Julius Caesar, and cliffs to Elsinore in Hamlet, in no way diminish the artistic truth and enjoyment of these plays. – Yours, etc,
KEN MAWHINNEY,
Dublin 16.