Occupied City

Steve McQueen's quietly powerful travelogue takes you on tandem journeys through Amsterdam during both Nazi occupation and COVID lockdown.

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.

Curator's Note

Steve McQueen's four and a half hour journey through Amsterdam is a unique cinema experience that will challenge viewers but will reward the patient.

Taking us almost door-to-door on a tour of oppressions and indignities, the film delivers incident after incident with a coolly measured tone. The film's true true power lies not in the information it delivers alone, but in its power to recruit the audience as complicit bystanders – quietly observing, but powerless to intervene.

– Reece Goodwin, Curator (Film & TV)