In Occupied City, his startling four-and-a-half-hour documentary, British director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) uses everyday scenes from the contemporary City of Amsterdam to map (literally) the disastrous fate of the city’s Jewish population during World War II.
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The movie was written by Bianca Stigter, McQueen’s wife, and informed by her book “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945.”
It is occupied in different ways, not just military sense: in May 1940, the German army seized control of its streets, corralled its Jewish residents into restricted areas, robbed them of their jobs and belongings, and later deported them by train to the death camps.
In the present, the place still recalls that hell of a time, whether its current residents can see them or not.
McQueen’s film shows a model European capital and forces us to reckon with the fact that within living memory, the most appalling crimes were being carried out in the same streets, parks and plazas friends and families now gather.
To watch Occupied City is to be wrenched back and forth between these two polar-opposite realities, struggle to comprehend how they can be one and the same place – and yet also notice strange and revealing points of overlap, where both eras momentarily align.
Occasionally, a detail bridges the gap between the two–the red-light district is still the red-light district.
Though the film mentions Anne Frank, it doesn’t visit her famous address in Prinsengracht, for McQueen, this was and remains an entire city of Anne Franks, as more than 60,000 died.
While the film’s tone is sober and steady, McQueen has scattered some lyrical interludes through the running time.
The effect can be startling, stirring and confounding. An elderly woman shifts to country music in apartment complex where a family was once arrested and sent to a concentration camp. A radio throbs with Bob Marley in a park where German officer once resided in the townhouses. A boy plays a virtual reality videogame where an execution took place.
It ends poignantly at the bar mitzvah of a boy who is Jewish, black, Dutch and European, identities that seem irreconcilable yet they are all bundled together.
“It’s almost like once upon a time there was this place called Earth,” McQueen said in an interview alongside Stigter.
“Occupied City,” which A24 releases in theaters Dec. 25, includes no archival footage or talking heads. Instead, it invites the viewer to consider the distance between one of history’s darkest chapters and the present now. It’s about remembering and forgetting.
“You want to wake people up and at the same time take them with you,” says McQueen, a British expat who has made Amsterdam his adoptive home with Stigter and their children.
