Where do you start with a REELmcr premiere? Like all big shows the excitement bubbles up and flows over till you’re all swimming in a wonderfully strange concoction that’s difficult to understand let alone convey.

As ‘The Lost Boy’ began I was seated with ten young men in tuxedos to my left, and eight old men in tuxedos to my front. The lads were there bolt upright and wide-eyed from start to finish, amazed that ‘the film’ they’d been working on could be so good, that THEY were the stars.

The old boys were all there in wheel chairs, some slumped, maybe trying to work out why they’d been wheeled there in the first place but knowing by the

end that THEY were the stars and that the hundreds of people present were taking this one last chance to let them know (Most of them appear in the film, and one of their number sadly died just days before it was screened). As the mortar and machine gun fire rained down on our on-screen heroes the teenagers gasped at how real it seemed, that they were right there in it, while the old men palpably appeared relieved that it seemed so fake and that those young lads weren’t ‘in it’ at all, and this in no small way due to their bravery and sacrifice.

On this the 60th D-Day anniversary it was a wonderful way to understand something of such an historical event and the old soldiers received a long, warm, standing ovation. But the night was far from a flag waving celebration of war, or indeed a glittering oscar ceremony for everyone who has worked so hard.

It was clear from the film and the audience who watched it that not only are those who gave so much now receiving so little (by way of quality of life and pensions) but that every generation that has followed, including our young men in tuxedos, is threatened with the same grisly battles in which fresh faced boys are sent to terrible deaths.

And so in the stunning interior of the Imperial War Museum North,