The Forgotten Battle, a new World War II epic, hit Netflix last week and has been at the top of the streaming platform’s movie charts around the world. As of Friday, the movie is at number two on the Top 10 movies in the U.S., behind another Netflix original, Night Teeth. The movie has been the number one movie in The Netherlands, the country where the film was made.
The Forgotten Battle was directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and written by Paul van der Oest. It is a dramatization of the Battle of the Scheldt in 1944 when the Allies fought Nazi Germany to open a shipping route to Antwerp that could provide forces with supplies in northwest Europe. The battle ended with an Allied victory and the liberation of the Netherlands, led by the First Canadian Army. Gijs Blom, whom Netflix subscribers might recognize from The Letter for the King, stars as a Dutch Axis soldier, while Jamie Flatters plays a British pilot. Susan Radder stars as a resistance fighter in German-occupied Zeeland.
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This was Netflix’s first Dutch film. It was first announced in November 2019, with funding from CoBo, Netherlands Film Fund, Flemish Audiovisual Fund, and the Belgian Tax Shelter. “In this film, we show war like never before in a Dutch movie,” producer Alain de Levita said in a statement at the time. “We also consciously chose a young cast. With this talented Dutch and international cast, we set the tone for a grand and compelling war drama, especially [for] a young generation [that] must experience what it was like to grow up in a war and the consequences of the choices young people made then.”
The Forgotten Battle was first screened in Vlissingen, the Netherlands in December 2020 and was finally released to theaters in the Netherlands in June. It was released on Netflix on Oct. 15. There have not been too many English-language reviews on the film yet, but Deciderย suggests it is worth checking out. The movie “approaches the scope of a war epic in look and feel while keeping its focus on the disparate trio of individuals at its core, fated to meet in war,” the site noted.
There are plenty of other World War II movies and documentaries also available on Netflix. These include Company of Heroes, Defiance, The 12th Man, Air Stike, and The Guns of Navarone. The documentary series Greatest Events of World War II in Colour and WWII in HD are also avaialble to stream.
