The Oscar-winning British film director, Sir Steve McQueen, who is most famous for bringing the horror of the slave trade to cinema screens, has turned his lens on the forgotten, and even officially censored, terrors that London underwent during the second world war.
His starry new film, Blitz, which opens the London film festival (LFF) next month, is a powerful evocation of the perils of life during the German Blitzkrieg – a bombing campaign that aimed to batter Britain into submission in the early 1940s. McQueen, whose most recent film, Occupied City, was a long study of the impact of the war and the Holocaust on Amsterdam, was partly inspired to make Blitz by learning of a catastrophe at an east London tube station. Details were suppressed by the wartime government to protect public morale.
