Film Picks: Kneecap, Mountains May Depart, Seven Veils

Kneecap (R21)

In the late 2010s, a friend of Belfast native Naoise “Moglai Bap” O Caireallain was arrested for spray-painting a bus stop. Instead of speaking English, he addressed the police only in Irish, which infuriated them.

Northern Ireland, of which Belfast is the capital, is part of the United Kingdom. The disavowal of English was a snub to the authorities and a cheeky political statement.

That real-life incident is recreated in Kneecap (2024), a biopic of the Belfast rap band of the same name. The group’s members – O Caireallain, Liam Og “Mo Chara” O Hannaidh and JJ “DJ Provai” O Dochartaigh – promote their mother tongue by releasing records in English and Irish, each song a declaration of their identity against the backdrop of the region’s troubled past.

The trio play themselves, while seasoned actors like Michael Fassbender, who is German-Irish, have supporting roles.

The 105-minute comedy-drama won an audience award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024. It also earned six British Academy Film Awards nominations in 2025, with Irish writer-director Rich Peppiatt winning Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer.

Kneecap was the Irish entry to the 2025 Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category.

The film is presented by The Projector in collaboration with the Singapore Film Society, as part of SFS Showcase #43, with support from the Embassy of Ireland in Singapore.

Where: The Projector at Cineleisure, 05-01, 8 Grange Road
MRT: Somerset
When: April 12, 7.30pm
Admission: $17.50 (standard), $15.50 (students, full-time national servicemen, seniors)
Info:

str.sg/m6gF

Mountains May Depart (PG13)

In this 2015 film, acclaimed Chinese writer-director Jia Zhangke once more looks at the lives of ordinary people swept along by China’s embrace of capitalism over the last several decades.

Told in three time-jump periods over 131 minutes, the story opens in 1999 with a love triangle – Tao (Zhao Tao), a spirited shopkeeper in her 20s, has to choose between labourer Liangzi (Liang Jingdong) and wealthy petrol station owner Jingsheng (Zhang Yi). In the sections that follow, set in 2014 and 2025, the bittersweet consequences of her choice are shown.

The drama competed for the Palme d’Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and at the 2015 Golden Horse Awards, where it won Best Original Screenplay.

A review by the British Film Institute calls Mountains May Depart “a movie of taciturn eloquence” and a nostalgia-tinged melodrama that, at its core, describes “a sense of home that you can’t go back to”. It is being screened as part of the Asian Film Archive’s 6 Films By Jia Zhangke programme.

Where: Oldham Theatre, National Archives of Singapore Building, 1 Canning Rise
MRT: City Hall/Bras Basah
When: April 20, 2pm
Admission: $10 (general), $9 (concession)
Info:

str.sg/fQWp

Seven Veils (NC16)

110 minutes, now showing
★★★★☆

Theatre director Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried) is entrusted with reviving her late legendary mentor’s opus Salome, but the experience awakens long-repressed traumas.

The 1905 opera Salome by German composer Richard Strauss enacts the eponymous princess’ infatuation with the prophet John the Baptist. She dances the infamous Dance of the Seven Veils before her stepfather King Herod in exchange for John’s head.

Jeanine’s affairs in Seven Veils are almost as perverse, albeit without the decapitation. Her much older, married mentor was her lover, and he had appropriated her memories of her father’s childhood abuse for his Salome.

All her unresolved feelings are coming back to her during her rehearsals, which are really Armenian-Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan’s 2023 mounting of Salome for the Canadian Opera Company.

Egoyan concurrently filmed his actual opera and his fictional movie, collapsing documentary and dramaturgy.

The intricate meta-text, impossible to pick apart, is mesmerising. This is an intense psychological drama with expressionistic shadow-play designs. – Whang Yee Ling