Mark Cousins’ cine-memoir opens with a lightning storm; a fitting overture to the violent convulsions that have shaken his native city to the verge of despair.

In the past half century, Belfast’s name has been virtually synonymous with bombings and murders, and a sectarian divide that seemed, at times, so bitterly entrenched as to be unbridgeable – The Troubles, in short. Cousins knows they cannot be avoided, but he also knows how few would delight in a documentary on the subject. Humankind cannot bear very much reality, and the filmgoing kind stand for even less.

Seeking an alternative vision of the place, Cousins styles I Am Belfast as a duologue between his own disembodied voice and that of a woman (played by Helena Bereen) who claims to be 10,000 years old. “You’re a wee speck in the landscape,” she tells him. “I am the landscape.” His camera follows this ancient matriarchal spirit on a wander through city streets and through history, mingling images of the urban present with archive footage of Belfast in its shipbuilding heyday and the dockyards where the Titanic was made (“it was fine when it left here”, goes the local quip).