This interview has been edited for clarity.
There are still stories from World War II that remain strangely, and almost inexplicably, unheard.
Filmmaker Natalie Schwan’s The Resistance, premiering at this year’s Dances With Films, is built around one of them: a nearly unbelievable act of defiance carried out by four young people in Belgium, armed with little more than conviction and, as Schwan notes, “a single pistol”—that ultimately helped save over one hundred lives.
“It’s kind of a shame,” she says. “No one really knows about this story.”
Even in Belgium, where fragments of the story persist, its reach feels limited. “It’s a very proud Belgian story,” she explains, “but outside of that… people just don’t know it. Which is crazy.”
It’s the kind of story that sounds impossible until it isn’t. The kind that forces a question not just of history, but of memory: how does something so extraordinary remain, for the most part, unknown?
That tension, between scale and obscurity, is where Schwan’s proof-of-concept pilot finds its footing. Rather than gravitate toward the familiar iconography of World War II cinema, she is drawn to the margins. They feel alive: messy, specific, unresolved.
“I was trying to find something that we hadn’t really seen before,” she says. “I knew I wanted to tell a resistance story.”
What she found was not just a historical event, but a point of entry. A way to collapse the distance between past and present through something deeply human: the impulsiveness of youth, the weight of decision, the unknowable consequences of action.
Part of the pull was personal. With family roots in Belgium, the story carried an added resonance—not as a driving force, but as an undercurrent. “I was fascinated to have that little tie into my family’s history.”
And at the center of it all is a detail that resists abstraction.
“It was literally four college-aged kids,” Schwan says. “Four people pulled this off.”
A Sense of Place and Its Memory
Instead of recreating Europe through approximation, The Resistance was filmed in Belgium itself; a decision that reshaped the project in both practical and intangible ways.
Initially, the plan was different. “We were trying to figure out how to do this stateside,” Schwan says. “Looking for places that could double.” Then the math shifted. “It might actually be cheaper to go to Belgium.”
What followed was a hybrid production: a small American team embedded within a largely Belgian crew. “We brought five U.S. team. Everyone else was from Belgium.” But the deeper impact isn’t visual. “You could just feel the history there,” she says.
That sense of proximity deepened through collaboration. “A few of them even had family members who were involved in this resistance,” she notes, a reminder that the past, here, isn’t distant, it’s inherited. For Schwan, authenticity extended beyond location into language and performance.
“I wanted authentic accents,” she says plainly. “It drives me up the wall when it’s not.”
Actors were encouraged to adjust dialogue, shifting phrasing when necessary. “I gave them creative license… they’d tell me, ‘We wouldn’t really say it like that.’”
“I’m an American coming in… trying to be a responsible caretaker of their story.”
The phrasing is telling. Not ownership, but custodianship. A subtle but important distinction.
This openness becomes central to the film’s texture. It resists the flattening effect that often accompanies historical storytelling, where accuracy is reduced to surface-level details. Instead, it moves toward something more difficult to define: cultural specificity that feels lived-in rather than performed.
At the same time, The Resistance does not position itself as pure reconstruction.
There are deliberate deviations, most notably the inclusion of female characters in a historical event that, by Schwan’s account, did not directly involve them. The choice could easily feel cosmetic, but here it’s grounded in the realities of form.
Authenticity, in this context, isn’t treated as a fixed endpoint, but as a collaborative process shaped through cultural fluency and lived experience. “I was relying on them,” she explains, “for what felt right culturally, historically.”
Even the smallest details reinforced that process.
“There were things that surprised me,” she recalls. “You think something looks modern—and then you realize, no, that’s exactly what it was.”
Emotional stakes must be established quickly; relationships defined within limited space. The introduction of a love story and a sibling dynamic isn’t about revisionism so much as access—an entry point into the material that allows audiences to connect before the weight of the event itself takes hold.
It’s a balancing act familiar to any filmmaker working within historical frameworks: fidelity to fact versus fidelity to feeling.
What We Don’t See
That tension extends into the pilot’s visual approach. Where many war narratives lean into spectacle, The Resistance takes a more restrained path, one shaped as much by necessity as by intention.
Rather than attempting to replicate scale, Schwan sidesteps it. “We hear troops, we hear tanks… we rely on sound and lighting instead of showing everything.”
What emerges is something more intimate, and perhaps more affecting. The absence of large-scale action shifts the focus back onto the individuals at the center of the story. The event itself becomes less of a set piece and more of a looming presence, its impact measured not in spectacle but in consequence.
“It can be more powerful what you don’t see,” Schwan notes, “bringing it down to how it affects two characters.” In a landscape saturated with visual excess, that restraint feels deliberate.
Like many proof-of-concepts, The Resistance exists partly as a blueprint, a starting point for something larger. Schwan envisions the story expanding into either a miniseries or an anthology, the latter exploring different acts of resistance.
It’s an appealing structure, particularly for material like this, where singular moments ripple outward into broader historical contexts. More time would allow for a different kind of storytelling: not just the act itself, but the build-up, the relationships, the everyday realities that make such actions possible.
The train heist at the center of this story, currently felt more than seen, could eventually become a culmination rather than an endpoint.
The Present in the Past
For Schwan, the story is not only about what happened, but what it represents.
“I want people to stick to the courage of their convictions,” she says.
In the context of World War II, that courage carried life-or-death consequences. Today, the stakes are different, but not absent. Social, personal, ideologicall, the pressure to conform or stay silent persists, even if the risks are less overt.
“It still requires bravery to live fully today.” That throughline (between past and present, between large acts of resistance and smaller, everyday ones) is what ultimately gives the film its resonance. Not just as a historical artifact, but as something closer to a mirror.
As The Resistance begins its festival run, it occupies that familiar liminal space for independent filmmakers: both a completed work and a steppingstone toward something else.
“I’m very proud of what we accomplished,” Schwan says, “but it’s really a tool to help get this made into a long-form series.”
There’s a certain pragmatism in that framing—one that reflects the realities of the current landscape. And her advice to other filmmakers echoes that shift:
“Chase incentives. Chase labs. Chase funding.”
It’s less romantic than the mythology of filmmaking often allows, but perhaps more honest. Stories, after all, don’t just need to be told. They need the conditions to exist.
What Remains
In bringing this particular story to the screen, Schwan doesn’t attempt to redefine history so much as reintroduce it; pulling something from the margins into clearer view.
And in doing so, The Resistance reminds us that the past is not always as settled as it seems. That even now, there are stories waiting, not to be discovered, but simply to be heard.
And we can’t wait to see what else she tells.
We want to thank Natalie Schwan for taking the time to speak with us.
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