They Shall Not Grow Old

One hundred years after the Great War, Peter Jackson set out to give its soldiers their voices back.

Using 600 hours of BBC archival interviews with WWI veterans, Jackson spent five years restoring and colorizing century-old Imperial War Museum footage. Forensic lip-readers dubbed dialogue from silent film; hand-cranked cameras slowed to natural speed. The result transforms grainy black-and-white images into vivid portraits of men who enlisted at fifteen, endured trenches, and returned forever changed. The soldiers narrate entirely in their own words—enlistment, training, trench life, combat—with no historians interpreting their experience.

A landmark achievement that makes a century-old war feel immediate and deeply human.