Occupied City
Where do the memories of a city go? From Oscar and BAFTA winning filmmaker, and Turner Prize-winning visual artist Steve McQueen, comes this mesmerising and monumental excavation of how the past haunts our precarious present: mirroring it and warning us in plain sight. Informed by the book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945 written by Bianca Stigter, the documentary creates two interlocking portraits. One shows the city’s devastating Nazi occupation through door-to-door accounts – tales of Jewish persecution, of resistance, collaboration, valour, and denial. The other is a vivid journey through the last years of pandemic and protest. The combination has a transformative effect with which McQueen opens up a poetic, dreamlike space where unthinkable history and hope for a new future co-exist.
The film is informed by the rigorously researched and lauded Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, written by historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, McQueen’s partner. The film travels to around 130 addresses in the city to uncover what occurred behind each window in those calamitous years. The emotional power of these stories accumulates over the course of the film, laying bare the mechanics of both systematic oppression and sudden bravery; both calculated terror and life-saving luck; both ordinary and extraordinary ways of surviving.
Yet, the film’s hypnotic imagery is entirely of our time, persistently moving forward. McQueen uses no archival footage, nor a single interview. Instead, the panoramas are awash in the rhythms of modern daily life, shot through at times with the eerie time-distortion of covid’s protocols and losses, and the sudden eruption of fervid street protests—for freedom, against racism, and to halt climate change.
The film is a meditation on time, memory, and immediacy—history as something all around us, and something we continually create. It is also a highly personal journey, as we weave in and out of houses and remembrances, in and out of grief, indignation, and moments of joy, hearing history, seeing the recent world, and wondering about tomorrow.
