The director of 12 Years A Slave and Small Axe has created a historical aesthetic of a tragic and turbulent London, depicting lives subjected to a permanent black out, in Blitz, Steve McQueen’s new film based on authentic anecdotes and inspired by filmmaker archives of the era.
Your perception of war depends not just on when or where you were born but which level of social strata you inhabit. John Boorman’s recollection of the Luftwaffe’s lightening war on London in Hope and Glory (1987), was as an adventure. Untouched by war, Steven Spielberg drew on JG Ballard’s experiences in post-Pearl Harbour Shanghai for an equally exhilarating rites of passage in Empire of the Sun. British director Steve McQueen, was born in 1969 and grew up in Ealing’s West Indian community, but his archaeology of World War II on the home front is coloured by a British Imperial destruction.
Blitz is a Brothers Grimm style fairy tale which follows the harrowing journey of nine year old George (Elliott Heffernan), whose mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) evacuates him to safety........
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