Occupied City

Steve McQueen’s cinematic commemoration of the Holocaust offers a multidimensional experience full of gravity and sublimity.

A work of patient storytelling and gripping historical excavation, Steve McQueen’s four-and-a-half-hour documentary is a mammoth confrontation with a shameful historical legacy that draws parallels to our contemporary world.

With startling sobriety, McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Small Axe) recounts in prismatic fashion the realities of life in Amsterdam during World War II under the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Rather than rely on archival footage or talking heads, McQueen constructs the film from exquisitely composed, newly captured images of Amsterdam, compiled over the past three years, including during the city’s COVID lockdown. Over these shots, provocatively detached voiceover by actress Melanie Hyams—adapted from the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945) by Dutch journalist and documentarian Bianca Stigter—narrates the evils that took place in these exact places, public and private, not even a century ago.

Recalling McQueen’s more durational installation work as much as his narrative cinema, Occupied City accrues power as it forges ahead. Visually representing these spaces entirely within a present-day context, McQueen evokes the rise of right-wing extremism currently felt throughout the Western world, while never letting us forget that everywhere we stand is haunted by a violent past—and that to be in history is to constantly walk upon graves.

The film includes a 15 minute intermission and following the screening there will be a pre-recorded interview with director, Steve McQueen.

PLEASE NOTE THERE WILL BE NO ADS OR TRAILERS BEFORE THE FILM SCREENING DUE TO THE FILM'S LENGTH, SO IT WILL START PROMPTLY AT 2PM

Programme Type: Film

Director: Steve McQueen

Cast: Narrated by Melanie Hyams

Certificate: 12A

Running Time: 300 minutes