Filming locations in Dunkirk

Some films are made on the very ground their story remembers, and Dunkirk is one of them. Christopher Nolan shot his 2017 war epic on the same beach where the 1940 evacuation actually unfolded, and the wide, flat sands of Malo-les-Bains, together with the long mole reaching out into the Channel, are exactly where his stranded soldiers wait under fire for the boats that might carry them home.

Standing on that beach is the whole experience. It is a free public strand and promenade at Malo-les-Bains, open year-round and bracing in any weather, where the enormity of the history and the emptiness of the sands land on you at once. The long breakwater that plays such a part in the film is right there to walk out along.

To make sense of what happened here, pair the beach with the Dunkirk 1940 museum nearby, which tells the story of the evacuation in full and gives the windswept sands their weight. The two together turn a bracing seafront walk into something far more moving.

The locations sit a short walk from the town centre, so Dunkirk itself is the natural base, easily reached by train or car from the wider Hauts-de-France region and just across the water from England. There is no need for anything elaborate here, the beach and the mole are the point, and they are free and always open.

This is set-jetting of a more sober kind, less about glamour than about standing where both a film and a history converge. Come prepared for wind off the Channel in any season, give yourself time on the sands and in the museum, and Dunkirk rewards you with one of the most quietly powerful film locations in Europe.