Steve McQueen seeps into an old world for a new feature.
McQueen’s whopping four-hour long documentary “Occupied City” charts a five-year period from 1940 to 1945 during World War II in Amsterdam. Based on historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter’s “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945),” the documentary uses archival footage that McQueen spent three years collecting.
The official synopsis reads: The past collides with our precarious present in Steve McQueen’s bravura documentary Occupied City, informed by the book “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945),” written by Bianca Stigter. McQueen creates two interlocking portraits: a door-to-door excavation of the Nazi occupation that still haunts his adopted city, and a vivid journey through the last years of pandemic and protest. What emerges is both devastating and life-affirming, an expansive meditation on memory, time, and where we’re headed.
Melanie Hyams narrates the A24 and New Regency film, which debuted at Cannes. “Occupied City” is produced by director McQueen, author Stigter, Floor Onrust, and Anna Smith-Tenser. The IndieWire review applauded McQueen’s vision for “articulating how a city like Amsterdam moves through time. What does it choose to remember, and what does it allow itself to forget?”
Director McQueen told IndieWire that collaborating with wife Stigter was unexpected. “At first, I had this idea for an artwork that would project the present onto the past,” McQueen said. “My wife was writing this book and while talking to her, I thought it would be great to film the book. I didn’t think in a million years that my wife and I would collaborate, but somehow this emerged.”
McQueen spoke about the relevance of the WWII-set documentary today, saying, “With the rise of the far right being very vocal and given an actual platform, it’s being legitimized,” McQueen said. “I think when you get the images of what’s happening now and the actual stories of the past and put them together, it makes us question everything.”
The Oscar winner concluded of the four-hour film, “It wasn’t a case of wanting to do something long. It was a case of wanting to do something right.”
“Occupied City” premieres December 25 in theaters. Check out the trailer below.
