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The VICE Guide to Belfast
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The VICE Guide to Belfast

9 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
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Belfast in the weeks before the Twelfth of July, when Orange Order bands march to mark King William's 1690 victory over King James and tensions between unionists and nationalists spike every year. VICE's crew arrives months after a 25-year-old Catholic police officer was shot dead by dissident republicans and weeks after riots in east Belfast left a cameraman wounded by gunfire, and the film treats those events as evidence that the 1998 Good Friday Agreement settled the politics without settling the streets. Cameras follow residents through the unionist estates of east Belfast and the nationalist neighborhoods of the west, where peace walls still separate blocks and murals still argue for one side or the other. Interviews catch people mid-argument rather than reflecting from a distance, including flashes of open sectarian hostility the crew doesn't edit around. The parade itself closes the film as a test case: a legal, decades-old celebration that reads to one community as heritage and to the other as provocation, marching straight through neighborhoods that never fully made peace.