SILVER

Winner, Audience Award (NEXT), 2024 Sundance Film Festival; Best Irish Language Feature Film, Best Irish Film and Audience Award, 2024 Galway Film Fleadh; Seven British Independent Film Awards, including Best British Independent Film, Best Joint Lead Performance and Best Original Music

Irish rap trio Kneecap play themselves in this fiercely original sex, drugs and hip-hop biopic, laying down a global rallying cry for the defense of native cultures. When fate brings Belfast schoolteacher JJ (JJ "DJ Próvaí" Ó Dochartaigh) into the orbit of self-confessed "low-life scum" Naoise (Naoise "Móglaí Bap" Ó Cairealláin) and Liam Óg (Liam Óg "Mo Chara" Ó Hannaidh), the needle drops on a hip-hop act like no other. Rapping in their native Irish language, Kneecap fast become the unlikely figureheads of a civil rights movement to save their mother tongue. But the trio must first overcome police, paramilitaries and politicians trying to silence their defiant sound — while their anarchic approach to life often makes them their own worst enemies. Documentarian and journalist Rich Peppiatt (ONE ROGUE REPORTER) makes an unforgettable narrative feature debut — the first Irish-language film to screen in the Sundance Film Festival — which also co-stars Irish actors Michael Fassbender, Josie Walker and Simone Kirby in stellar supporting roles. (Note adapted from Sony Pictures Classics.) DIR/SCR Rich Peppiatt; PROD Trevor Birney, Jack Tarling. Ireland/UK, 2024, color, 105 min. In Irish and English with English subtitles. RATED R

Co-presented with Solas Nua's Capital Irish Film Festival (February 27–March 2).