Image of childhood in H. Mantel's short story "King Billy is a gentleman" and in K. Branagh's movie "Belfast"

Film and literature are important art forms and are often subject to comparison. In literature, images are created with the help of textual signs, while cinema uses sound and video. At the same time, an important theme for both film and literature has been and remains that of childhood, and many classics of literature and cinema put the conflict that a child may encounter in the center of their stories. Our study is devoted to a comparative analysis of the image of childhood in the story H. Mantel "King Billy is a Gentleman" (1992) and in the film "Belfast" by K. Branagh (2021). Both the story and the film tell about a painful period in history for Northern Ireland and for all the Irish people - the Troubles (1969-1989). More precisely, both the story and the film are about children who experienced the cruelty of hostility between Protestants and Catholics, about children whose lives were significantly affected by this period in one way or another. The protagonist of the film is a boy named Buddy, while the protagonist and the narrator of the story is a boy named Liam. Both children are about the same age, they are both Irish; however, Buddy lives in Belfast, when Liam lives near Manchester. Accordingly, the common and different features of the film and the story became the subject of our study. In the analysis, we compared the image of childhood based on specific aspects of the main characters' childhood lives. This work allows us to see that it is the internal situation in the family that has a huge impact on the child's self-perception, gives him an impulse for self-development, without noticing the chaos that happens around him.