Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos On BELFAST: ‘Our Thoughts Were To Tell This Story Through Portraiture”

Focus Features presents Kenneth Branagh’s BELFAST. Written and directed by Academy Award® nominee Branagh, BELFAST is the humorous, tender and intensely personal story of one boy’s childhood during the tumult of the late 1960s in the city of Branagh’s birth.

BELFAST is a movie straight from Branagh’s own experience. A nine-year-old boy must chart a path towards adulthood through a world that has suddenly turned upside down. His stable and loving community and everything he thought he understood about life is changed forever but joy, laughter, music and the formative magic of the movies remain.

The cast stars Golden Globe nominee Caitríona Balfe, Academy Award® winner Judi Dench, Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, and introduces the ten-year old Jude Hill. Dornan and Balfe play a passionate working-class couple caught up in the mayhem, with Dench and Hinds as the quick-witted grandparents. The film is produced by Branagh, Laura Berwick, Becca Kovacik and Tamar Thomas.

In this interview with Haris Zambarloukos, we hear about shooting in black and white, and how the acclaimed cinematographer finds his inspiration.

FILMOGRAPHY

Haris Zamabarloukos was born on 11 March 1970 in Nicosia, Cyprus. He obtained his BA in Fine Arts from the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. He obtained his MFA in Cinematography from the AFI Conservatory in 1997. He worked as a camera intern under Conrad Hall in A Civil Action (1998). His first feature film as a cinematographer was the 2000 film Camera Obscura. In 2006 he was named one of Variety’s “10 Cinematographers to Watch”. His first collaboration with director Kenneth Branagh was the 2007 film Sleuth starring Michael Caine. They collaborated again in the 2011 superhero film Thor. Zambarloukos is on the Board of Governors of the British Society of Cinematographers.