Oscars 2022: Branagh's Belfast gets seven nominations

It's a long way from Belfast's Tiger's Bay to the cusp of the biggest awards in Tinseltown.

But that is the journey Sir Kenneth Branagh has made with the film Belfast.

It has received seven nominations for this year's Oscars, the highest accolades in the film industry.

The heavily-autobiographical black and white film is set in the city on the brink of the Troubles in the late 1960s.

It has received many positive reviews since its release and is now in the running for cinema immortality at the ceremony on Sunday 27 March.

Sir Kenneth wrote, directed and co-produced Belfast, which has a stunning cast in Jamie Dornan, Caitríona Balfe, Ciarán Hinds, Judi Dench and Jude Hill as 10-year-old Buddy.

It is set in and around 96 Mountcollyer Street in Belfast's Tigers Bay - Branagh's childhood home.

Speaking today, Branagh said it was "a hell of a day for my family and the family of our film".

"Today, I think of my mother and father, and my grandparents - how proud they were to be Irish, how much this city meant to them. They would have been overwhelmed by this incredible honour - as am I," he added.

Branagh's parents left Belfast and moved to England when the Troubles started and at the Belfast Film Festival premiere in November he told BBC News NI that the film was about trying to understand why they made that decision.

"What I felt very strongly about that time was I felt very secure - I really knew who I was and I felt in this city that you couldn't get lost," he said.

"We were related to one half of Belfast and we went to school with the other half.

"That that was instantly lost in a moment of traumatic change which happened to everyone, was something I really wanted to understand my parents' process with."

Yet the film is also an affectionate portrait of a Belfast childhood, with Buddy often front and centre of the action.

Judi Dench and Northern Irish actor Ciarán Hinds play Buddy's grandparents, and both have been nominated for Oscars for their performances.

Dench is nominated for best supporting actress, an award she previously won for Shakespeare in Love, while Hinds gets a first nomination for best supporting actor.

Belfast has also been nominated in the coveted Best Picture category, while Branagh is nominated for Best Director and also Best Original Screenplay.

The film has also received a nomination for the Best Sound award, while Van Morrison - whose music features heavily throughout - is nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar for "Down to Joy".

Belfast faces stiff competition at the awards ceremony at the end of March.

But whatever happens the film has already presented a different story of Belfast to the world.

"I've spent my adult life travelling the world telling people with great pride that I'm from Belfast and always been met with this sort of gasp," Jamie Dornan told BBC News NI at the Belfast premiere.

"People can't believe you're from that place and you got out of there alive."

"No matter what we say about we say about it, no matter how we try to package it that is the world view of this place."

"And if we can show a different side of it then I think that's really important."