Director: Steve McQueen
Steve McQueen sets his 2024 wartime drama Blitz inside London's darkest nights, following a mother and son separated by the chaos of the German bombing campaign.
What is Blitz about?
In 1940, as German bombs fall nightly on London, single mother Rita puts her nine-year-old son George on a train bound for the safety of the English countryside. George, mixed-race and fiercely independent, refuses to accept the separation and jumps off the train, determined to walk his way home through a city under siege. His journey back becomes a odyssey through bombed-out streets, shelters, and strangers both kind and dangerous, while Rita searches for him against a backdrop of collapsing buildings and air-raid sirens. The film weaves George's perilous trek with Rita's factory-floor life and the fractured, resilient community around them, building toward a reunion neither can be certain will happen.
Cast & crew
Newcomer Elliott Heffernan carries the film as George, matched by Saoirse Ronan as his determined mother Rita. Harris Dickinson, Stephen Graham, Kathy Burke, and musician Benjamin Clémentine round out a supporting cast that captures wartime London's mixed, working-class texture.
Context & significance
Steve McQueen, the director behind 12 Years a Slave and Small Axe, drew on real accounts of mixed-race Britons during the Blitz to shape George's story, using large-scale production design to recreate bombed London rather than relying on stock footage. The production rebuilt entire street blocks and Underground station sets to capture how ordinary Londoners sheltered night after night, giving the film a lived-in scale that grounds George's solitary trek in a wider social picture of the city under siege.
Where & how to watch
Blitz streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow the story in their own language. The film's page is open to read for anyone; watching it just needs a free K-Time account login, with the interface itself fully available in Farsi.