Kneecap

Kneecap (2024) is a music-fueled comedy-drama you can watch online on iFILM, with a real Belfast rap trio playing themselves. The battlefield here is a language.

A school music teacher moonlighting as a police translator crosses paths with two lads who refuse, on principle, to speak English to the cops. In a notebook lifted from the station he finds sharp, raw verse — and talks them into something Ireland's scene has never heard: hip-hop in their native Irish. The group that forms turns songs about drugs, parties and self-expression into a movement to save a dying mother tongue. Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara and DJ Próvaí play themselves, while Michael Fassbender turns up as a republican father.

Director Rich Peppiatt delivers a brash, foul-mouthed and unexpectedly political origin story that took the Audience Award at Sundance and became the first Irish-language feature to reach screens worldwide. It moves with the energy of a punk gig, jokes right up to the line, and means it when it asks who gets to decide the language you live in. One for music-film fans and anyone drawn to stories of cultural defiance. Stream Kneecap (2024) online on iFILM.