Oscar-winning filmmaker Sir Steve McQueen hopes his new film will get “people off their iPhones” and “refocus our gaze” on what war is like for the children who live through it.
His new movie Blitz, set in wartime London and starring Irish actress Saoirse Ronan, will open this year’s London Film Festival later today.
In the film, Ronan plays a mum who, after having her son George evacuated to the countryside for his safety, ends up frantically searching the streets for him after learning he’s defiantly come home.
Eliott Heffernan plays the nine-year-old with much of the story told from his perspective.
Speaking to Sky News, McQueen set out what he hopes his latest movie will bring to audiences worldwide as he said: “Seeing war through a child’s eyes, at what point do we as adults look away?”
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While it’s an idea the 12 Years a Slave director has been working on for over a decade, he admitted it certainly feels “even more urgent” to be showing Blitz now as the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and beyond rage on.
McQueen says his young protagonist was inspired by a picture he discovered whilst researching the Blitz.
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“I saw this photograph, a boy with an oversized coat and a very large suitcase standing in railway station waiting to be evacuated, this black child, and I thought ‘that’s my in’.”
The film offers a much more diverse depiction of wartime London than audiences will perhaps have seen before, with characters like Ife – a Nigerian air raid warden – based on real individuals meticulously researched by McQueen’s team.
“I’m not interested in pointing anything out, I’m just interested in telling the truth…central London was quite cosmopolitan.
“It was kind of an everyday occurrence. Ife, our character, did exist, he patrolled the Marylebone area…So it’s not a case, as my son says, of flexing, it’s a case of just telling the truth.”
From the sound of bombs getting closer, to the scramble to find shelters, the film sets out to give a true sense of the terror and chaos of war for those on the ground. Set in the past but, the director hopes, just as relevant now.
“Hopefully, you know, it can help in one way, shape or form…and take people off their iPhones for five minutes or so.”
Blitz is the opening movie at this year’s BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in cinemas on 1 November and globally on Apple TV+ on 22 November.