Image: Warner Bros
Few movies made in Britain have been as successful as Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk”. Like many “British” films – and thanks to a generous tax credit scheme, coupled with a favourable exchange rate – “Dunkirk” was funded by a Hollywood studio (in this case, Warner Bros).
But whereas so many of our most lucrative movies have been franchises with a fictional British character at their core – Harry Potter, James Bond, Bridget Jones – “Dunkirk” is a one-off, firmly rooted in a British reality: the evacuation of over 334,000 Allied troops from the beaches of a beleaguered French seaside resort, where a few thousand British and French troops defied overwhelming German military might for enough days in May and June 1940 to allow their seemingly trapped colleagues to escape. As do some historians, Nolan describes this event as a “miracle” – in this case “the miracle of the little boats” – but, of course, there was nothing supernatural about the outcome.
