"I said I was eighteen, did the chief ask you to say you were nineteen? I thought about it and said yes."
"The draft requires you to be nineteen, but I'm not that old. My mother said you can't go, but I said no, that can't stop me."
"I was only sixteen then."
"I'm only fifteen years old."
In the black-and-white picture, the young men who enlisted in the army put on khaki military uniforms and embarked on the lush European battlefield with curiosity and hesitation. After the war, the uniforms were randomly discarded at the train station, and they returned to their monochrome hometown
They left the most colorful part on the battlefield.
The years when words were powerless to describe were put on the big screen by PJ. While it's modest to say that this is a film made by a non-historian for a non-historian, PJ's rigor and determination are no less than that of a brilliant war historian. The narration of the whole film comes from the oral histories of 30 or 40 World War I veterans collected by the BBC. I used the treasured World War I military uniforms to color the renderer for reference, dubbed the video with the treasured World War I weapons, and went to various battlefield sites in Europe to shoot a few scenes. Thousands of photos, ask a lip-reader to interpret the dialogues of the characters in the video. In one video, the speech of the executive was really difficult to decipher. He went to the archives to retrieve all the files of that day, read the suspected material aloud in person, and adjusted the speed of the sentence repeatedly, and finally determined that it was the speech in the video.
As a first-class director, PJ's keen eyes have uncovered many overlooked details. Some overexposed or too dark images, adjusted by the team, showed amazing detail. The dark shed was originally a small shed, but a small team was firing cannons; in the dark workshop, the female workers were working on fine machinery.
The respect for history, coupled with the director's keenness and outstanding aesthetics, has resulted in a documentary masterpiece of great value. I highly recommend everyone to watch it, and I strongly recommend everyone to watch the footage at the end of the film. The lines are dug up from memory and may not match the original film.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them." -Laurence Binyon
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