World War I · Film · 2018
They Shall Not Grow Old
Century-old film of British soldiers, restored, colourised and set to the voices of veterans, turns the Western Front from flickering archive into faces you feel you could talk to.
Where it happened
Follow the story across 3 places.
Stop 1: Recruiting offices, Britain
Veterans remember lying about their age to join up and the excitement of the first weeks of training.
Stop 2: Trenches of the Ypres Salient
Soldiers describe the routine of the line: rats, lice, trench foot, tea brewed under fire and the constant presence of the dead.
Stop 3: Over the top on the Somme
Key location
The film's heart is an infantry attack, told through the men who crossed no man's land behind the tanks and the few who reached the German wire.
What really happened
Commissioned for the centenary of the Armistice, Peter Jackson's documentary uses footage from the Imperial War Museum's archive, cleaned up, retimed to natural speed and colourised, and narrated only by British veterans recorded by the BBC and the museum in the 1960s and 1970s.
It follows the ordinary infantryman rather than any single battle: the rush of volunteers in 1914, many of them under age, training, life and death in the trenches of France and Belgium, an attack against the German line, and the uneasy return home in 1918. Over 700,000 men from the United Kingdom died in the war.
Where to watch
Checking streaming services…
Full details
- Original title
- They Shall Not Grow Old
- Directed by
- Peter Jackson
- Countries
- New Zealand, United Kingdom
- Languages
- English
- Released
- 2018
- Period
- –
- Theaters of war
- Western Europe
- Themes
- Documentary
- Combat
- True story
