Two major film stars were in Denver last week to talk about movies that show in very different ways just how far we have — and have not — come when it comes to human tribalism.

Annabella Sciorra spoke after the Denver Film Festival’s 30th anniversary screening of “Jungle Fever,” Spike Lee’s cynical 1991 commentary on interracial romance. The title, as so infectiously sung by Stevie Wonder, is Lee’s thorny term for what he considers to be the malady of unhealthy interracial relationships driven not by love or affection but rather by media-fueled myths about the sexual allure of the other race.

“Whether ‘Jungle Fever’ actually interrogates those issues or merely exacerbates them remains open to debate,” writes film critic Alex Ramon — but Lee no doubt threw down the cinematic gauntlet when he paired a married Black architect ( Wesley Snipes) with his white Italian American secretary (Sciorra) for a brief and doomed affair. Romeo and Juliet, they are not.

Jamie Dornan, meanwhile, appeared at the festival representing “Belfast,” Kenneth Branagh’s autobiographical tale of a sweet 9-year-old Protestant boy named Buddy (Jude Hill) and his chaotic life in a targeted

primarily Catholic neighborhood amid the sectarian violence of 1969. This was the beginning of a 30-year civil war remembered by history as simply “The Troubles,” which claimed more than 1,600 lives in Belfast alone.

A street scene depicting joyful everyday ordinariness is punctured when a group of Protestant men storm Buddy’s street smashing windows, throwing rocks, burning homes and blowing up cars with Molotov cocktails. Soon barricades are set up, and the neighborhood takes on the look of a war zone.

The radicals’ aim was to intimidate Catholics out of their homes, and it worked: Thousands of Catholic refugees soon fled south to safety in the Republic of Ireland. Until this time, parts of Belfast still had been relatively mixed, with Catholics and Protestants often living side by side. The film, which is only lightly political, focuses on this one equally endangered Protestant family’s wrenching decision whether to stay in the only home they have ever known, or leave and start a new life in England.

“Listen, people have had a tough time on the island of Ireland forever,” said Dornan, who plays Buddy’s father. “This is the 100th year of Northern Ireland’s existence, and for 30 of those years people were killing each other on different sides of the same street.”

And through it all, young Buddy is just trying to be a 9-year-old living a 9-year-old’s life negotiating girls, grades and God. Watching “Belfast,” I was struck at how similar certain parts of Buddy’s Protestant adolescence were to my own Catholic upbringing in Arvada, half a world away. Like Buddy, I had all the entertainment I ever needed in a case of Matchbox cars. Like Buddy, I was tormented by a sweaty priest’s fire and brimstone on the wages of sin. Buddy is dead-set on marrying the smartest girl in class, whether she likes him back or not. I was so nervous to ask my fifth-grade girlfriend to go steady, I threw the drug-store ring at her. Buddy’s family holds onto their seats at the movies watching the astonishing (for its day) special effects of the flying car in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” just as ours did 4,300 miles away at the Arvada Plaza movie theatre. It’s like Buddy and I were the same kid. Only he’s adorable, the girl likes him back, and he’ll probably win an Oscar.

Growing up Irish American, I never could reconcile how so many people were killing each other in the name of such similar religions that pray to the same God. “The Troubles” were more about loyalty to the United Kingdom, of course. But how unchristian, it seemed to a simple young me, that so many should die over adherence to papal authority.

But we’ve all learned in recent years that Americans have no leg to stand on when it comes to judging how others resolve conflict and heal divisions.

There have been 23 years of relative peace in Northern Ireland, “but there is a long way to go,” said Dornan, who believes the problem, then as now, remains segregation and separation: Loyalty to a tribe over a neighbor.

“Less than 5 percent of schools in Northern Ireland are integrated between Catholics and Protestants in 2021, and that is so astonishingly bad,” Dornan said. “The reality is, 95 percent of those kids are separated from the age of 4 years old. How do you have hope when that’s the craic at home?”

“Jungle Fever” was released with tension in New York at a fever pitch similar to 1969 Belfast. Racial clashes were common following the 1989 murder of 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins by a crowd of white youths in a predominantly Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn.

It’s impossible to watch “Jungle Fever” in 2021 outside the present-day context of Ahmaud Arbery, Elijah McClain, Kyle Rittenhouse, Tucker Carlson, anti-vaxxers and violent insurrectionists. Americans today are so split into ideological, religious and ethnic camps that they are fully walled off by the protective fortress of the internet. Even from their own families.

“Jungle Fever,” Sciorra said last week in Denver, “was way ahead of its time.”

But 30 years later, the elephant in the room is not so much interracial romance but another kind of animal: Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced film mogul now serving 23 years in prison for sexual crimes against women. Early last year, Sciorra testified that Weinstein raped her in 1994. As you now look back at “Jungle Fever” and watch Sciorra’s character be viciously beaten by her own father for having had sex with a Black man, you can’t help but draw a parallel between the way women are treated in their own homes and how women at the very height of the acting profession have been treated within the Hollywood system for decades.

The pathology may have changed, but the underlying racism and toxic masculinity and jungle fever that fueled the neighborhood’s violent response to the interracial story in Lee’s film is as real as ever.

And that’s a hard thing for Sciorra to resolve. The question she was asked most when the film was released was whether Angie’s upbringing in any way mirrored her own. The answer? Not by a Brooklyn mile.

“That is not my story, and that is not my family,” Sciorra said. “I didn’t grow up in that kind of household. My father was a veterinarian. Spike could not believe that I never heard the ‘n’ word in my house. I think Angie’s journey is simply that of a woman finding herself, and wanting more than what is available to her in Bensonhurst.” Just as Dornan’s character aspires for something for his family that is, if not better, then at least safer than Belfast in a time of war.

But there is hope. It was evident in Sciorra’s courageous testimony against Weinstein, who is no longer in power — he is in prison. It’s evident in Belfast, which is a completely different city today from the one you see in 1969. (I mean, the opening credits look like they were provided by Tourism Northern Ireland.)

“I’ve spent 20 years traveling around the world for work, and I am met with all kinds of reactions when I tell people I am from Belfast,” Dornan said. “People can’t believe it. ‘And you got out alive?’ That’s the response a lot of the time. So hopefully this film helps to show people that there are brilliant, normal, funny, resilient people in Belfast just trying to do their best.”

We should all be so lucky.

Denver Gazette contributing arts columnist John Moore is an award-winning journalist who was named one of the 10 most influential theater critics by American Theatre Magazine. He is now producing independent journalism as part of his own company, Moore Media.