The Oscar-winning filmmaker joins Q’s Tom Power to talk about his new film, and why the story is still relevant in 2024.

Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” is two different movies. One of them is an “Oliver Twist” tale of a biracial boy making his way back to his mother in wartime London. The other is a starkly tense and violent story of the home front during the relentless bombardment of British cities by German aircraft at the height of World War II.

The director illuminates his new World War II epic, focused on a boy’s fight to get back home amid the rubble of war-torn London.

Here, Josh Levine, author of The Secret History of the Blitz and a consultant on the film, talks to TIME about the hardships brought on by the Blitz and the scenes that are based on real people and incidents.

Blitz' director Steve McQueen on the choices he made to create his homage to wartime London with Saoirse Ronan and newcomer Elliott Heffernan.

Seeing war through a child’s eyes is sobering. It helps us reconnect to a situation that’s ongoing and unfortunately very familiar."

While those born years after the months-long 1940 Nazi bombing of London may have no clue about Hitler’s merciless destruction of civilian targets or the Brits’ courageous resistance, the subject,

Steve McQueen's latest movie, Blitz, is far from his best work but it proves impressively moving in its most intimate segments.