Occupied City.At one point in Steve McQueen’s new documentary, Occupied City, the director sends his camera touring through the halls of a school in present-day Amsterdam as voice-over narration describes it having been the temporary site of an SS headquarters during the Nazi occupation. For just a moment it feels as though all of history has collapsed into itself. To see images of a building dedicated to the enrichment of children while hearing of its one-time appropriation for such monstrosity demands reckoning with the meaning even benign living spaces might hold. Occupied City is filled with such moments of dark revelation born of unthinkable contrasts: an apartment building that was home to the Dutch resistance, a grand theater used as a processing center for Jewish deportation, a now-bustling sidewalk by the river where three resistance members were publicly executed. In the long history of Amsterdam, the occupation, though seismic in impact,...
- 1/29/2024
- MUBI
Oscar winner Steve McQueen says he believes that, while the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Middle East has seen a rise in antisemitism across Europe and the US, he believes it has always been there, but that “people have been deaf to it.”
McQueen, whose 2014 movie 12 Years a Slave brought him an Academy Award for Best Picture as well as an Oscar nomination for direction, has made an epic documentary film based on his wife Bianca Stitger’s book about the Nazi occupation of the couple’s home town of Amsterdam, Atlas of an Occupied City: 1940-1945.
The documentary film, which is cinemas from February 9th, runs to four hours and 23 minutes in total, including a break, and McQueen told The Times of London the extraordinary length was necessary to contain all the stories he wanted to tell – including the fates of the occupants of 130 private homes, plus other buildings and spaces around the city,...
McQueen, whose 2014 movie 12 Years a Slave brought him an Academy Award for Best Picture as well as an Oscar nomination for direction, has made an epic documentary film based on his wife Bianca Stitger’s book about the Nazi occupation of the couple’s home town of Amsterdam, Atlas of an Occupied City: 1940-1945.
The documentary film, which is cinemas from February 9th, runs to four hours and 23 minutes in total, including a break, and McQueen told The Times of London the extraordinary length was necessary to contain all the stories he wanted to tell – including the fates of the occupants of 130 private homes, plus other buildings and spaces around the city,...
- 1/27/2024
- by Caroline Frost
- Deadline Film + TV
The opening of Steve McQueen’s “Widows” is a great example of how filmmaking encourages us to create stories in our heads that exist across space and time. There’s a fantastic, rhythmic seesaw between domestic moments between a set of couples and moments of the men running from a heist gone wrong; in the intertwining of the two —with sound matches that couldn’t be coming from more different sources but still audibly line up — McQueen and editor Joe Walker lead the viewer to conclusions about who these thieves are in the moments right before they are no more.
“Occupied City,” McQueen’s latest film, expands on this particularly cinematic capacity to create story via the deliberate selection and omission of imagery — which is a roundabout way of saying that it’s a film about the Nazi Occupation of Amsterdam during World War II that doesn’t use archive footage,...
“Occupied City,” McQueen’s latest film, expands on this particularly cinematic capacity to create story via the deliberate selection and omission of imagery — which is a roundabout way of saying that it’s a film about the Nazi Occupation of Amsterdam during World War II that doesn’t use archive footage,...
- 1/4/2024
- by Sarah Shachat
- Indiewire
Steve McQueen’s critically acclaimed documentary Occupied City will be released in UK cinemas 9 February 2024.
Occupied City had its world premiere at Cannes Film Festival in May 2023, but UK audiences still have a while to wait until they can sit down to watch it. Modern Films are bringing the Holocaust documentary to UK cinemas 9th February 2024.
Here’s the film’s official synopsis: “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 film which draws a parallel...
Occupied City had its world premiere at Cannes Film Festival in May 2023, but UK audiences still have a while to wait until they can sit down to watch it. Modern Films are bringing the Holocaust documentary to UK cinemas 9th February 2024.
Here’s the film’s official synopsis: “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 film which draws a parallel...
- 12/7/2023
- by Maria Lattila
- Film Stories
Steve McQueen bridges the past horrors of Nazi-era Amsterdam with a threatening present-day extremism in the trailer for Occupied City, a four-hour documentary from the 12 Years a Slave helmer inspired by a book by his wife, Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter.
The teaser trailer, which A24 dropped on Tuesday (below), remains tightly focused on modern-day Amsterdam as McQueen’s camera captures in his adopted city locals walking, jogging, skating, dancing, getting married and otherwise going about their everyday lives.
But those visuals are overlaid by narrator Melanie Hyams recalling the murders, suicides, resistance and betrayals that convulsed Amsterdam’s Jewish community in the early 1940s as the occupying Germany’s noose steadily closed around the neck of their embattled community.
That combination of McQueen’s elegant portrait of Amsterdam today and a matter-of-fact narration written by Stigter, author of the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945), which inspired the documentary,...
The teaser trailer, which A24 dropped on Tuesday (below), remains tightly focused on modern-day Amsterdam as McQueen’s camera captures in his adopted city locals walking, jogging, skating, dancing, getting married and otherwise going about their everyday lives.
But those visuals are overlaid by narrator Melanie Hyams recalling the murders, suicides, resistance and betrayals that convulsed Amsterdam’s Jewish community in the early 1940s as the occupying Germany’s noose steadily closed around the neck of their embattled community.
That combination of McQueen’s elegant portrait of Amsterdam today and a matter-of-fact narration written by Stigter, author of the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945), which inspired the documentary,...
- 10/24/2023
- by Etan Vlessing
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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.
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.
- 10/24/2023
- by Samantha Bergeson
- Indiewire
The monumental film which tracks day-to-day life in Amsterdam under Nazi rule asks hard questions of what we think about the gulf between past and present
Steve McQueen’s monumental film is a vast survey-meditation on the wartime history and psychogeography of his adopted city: Amsterdam, based on his wife Bianca Stigter’s Dutch-language book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945.
With a calm and undemonstrative narrative voiceover from Melanie Hyams, the film tracks day-to-day life in Amsterdam under Nazi rule. It spans the invasion in 1940; the establishment of the Nsb, the collaborationist Dutch Nazi party; the increasingly brutal repression and deportation of Jewish populations to the death camps; and then the “hunger winter” of 1944 to 1945 as food and fuel became scarce in the city and the Nazis displayed a gruesome mix of panic and fanaticism as the allies closed in.
Steve McQueen’s monumental film is a vast survey-meditation on the wartime history and psychogeography of his adopted city: Amsterdam, based on his wife Bianca Stigter’s Dutch-language book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945.
With a calm and undemonstrative narrative voiceover from Melanie Hyams, the film tracks day-to-day life in Amsterdam under Nazi rule. It spans the invasion in 1940; the establishment of the Nsb, the collaborationist Dutch Nazi party; the increasingly brutal repression and deportation of Jewish populations to the death camps; and then the “hunger winter” of 1944 to 1945 as food and fuel became scarce in the city and the Nazis displayed a gruesome mix of panic and fanaticism as the allies closed in.
- 5/17/2023
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. A24 releases the film in limited theaters on Monday, December 25.
A four-and-a-half-hour World War II documentary that doesn’t include a single frame of archival footage or talking head testimony, Steve McQueen’s provocative but emotionally stultifying “Occupied City” refracts the fading memory of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam through the prism of the city’s more recent Covid lockdown — a rare pause in the flow of time, and one that McQueen eagerly seized upon as a chance to measure its powers of erosion.
The film’s conceit is as simple as it is almost immediately numbing: Each of its 130 fragments is dedicated to a different address throughout the city, the past and present of these sites fractured across two parallel timelines that are offered to us all at once. While our ears listen to monotone narrator Melanie Hyams list...
A four-and-a-half-hour World War II documentary that doesn’t include a single frame of archival footage or talking head testimony, Steve McQueen’s provocative but emotionally stultifying “Occupied City” refracts the fading memory of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam through the prism of the city’s more recent Covid lockdown — a rare pause in the flow of time, and one that McQueen eagerly seized upon as a chance to measure its powers of erosion.
The film’s conceit is as simple as it is almost immediately numbing: Each of its 130 fragments is dedicated to a different address throughout the city, the past and present of these sites fractured across two parallel timelines that are offered to us all at once. While our ears listen to monotone narrator Melanie Hyams list...
- 5/17/2023
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
In cinematic form, how do you tell history without archive footage? Occupied City shows how it can be done, and to what effect.
Steve McQueen’s audacious documentary, which premiered at Cannes on Wednesday in the festival’s Special Screenings section, undertakes a portrait of Amsterdam during the Dutch city’s occupation by the Nazis from 1940-45. But it does so without making use of a single frame of film or stills from the era itself – no German tanks rumbling over the thoroughfares, no jackbooted troops on patrol, no black-and-white imagery of terrified civilians running for safety.
Director Steve McQueen
The remarkably bold approach, instead, uses only scenes of Amsterdam today while a narrator (Melanie Hyams) recounts in almost clinical fashion what took place virtually door to door and street to street during the Nazi occupation. For instance, at the opulent Concertgebouw we learn the invaders took a shine to...
Steve McQueen’s audacious documentary, which premiered at Cannes on Wednesday in the festival’s Special Screenings section, undertakes a portrait of Amsterdam during the Dutch city’s occupation by the Nazis from 1940-45. But it does so without making use of a single frame of film or stills from the era itself – no German tanks rumbling over the thoroughfares, no jackbooted troops on patrol, no black-and-white imagery of terrified civilians running for safety.
Director Steve McQueen
The remarkably bold approach, instead, uses only scenes of Amsterdam today while a narrator (Melanie Hyams) recounts in almost clinical fashion what took place virtually door to door and street to street during the Nazi occupation. For instance, at the opulent Concertgebouw we learn the invaders took a shine to...
- 5/17/2023
- by Matthew Carey
- Deadline Film + TV
Steve McQueen’s “Occupied City,” an experimental documentary about Amsterdam under Nazi rule, clocks in at a menacing four-and-a-half hours with one intermission — but the filmmaker makes no apologies for its heft. “It wasn’t a case of wanting to do something long,” he said over Zoom from his home in the same city where the movie takes place. “It was a case of wanting to do something right.”
It could have run much longer: McQueen shot 36 hours worth of material, nine times more than the final cut. The movie, which premieres at Cannes this week, pairs footage of modern-day Amsterdam with dry narration by performance artist Melanie Hyams about the Nazi persecution of the Jews that took place. The voiceover culls from the book “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945),” by his wife, Dutch journalist and documentarian Bianca Stigter. “It needed to be a journey so you get to know the city,...
It could have run much longer: McQueen shot 36 hours worth of material, nine times more than the final cut. The movie, which premieres at Cannes this week, pairs footage of modern-day Amsterdam with dry narration by performance artist Melanie Hyams about the Nazi persecution of the Jews that took place. The voiceover culls from the book “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945),” by his wife, Dutch journalist and documentarian Bianca Stigter. “It needed to be a journey so you get to know the city,...
- 5/16/2023
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
Amsterdam today. Pause on a bridge and watch the Amstel River gently flow through picturesque canals. Eighty years ago, the same vista might have revealed a horror – bodies floating by of Jews who had flung themselves into the Amstel rather than face cruel death from the occupying Nazi forces.
A park bench in the Dutch city today. A young couple embraces in glowing sunshine. Eight decades ago, benches in parks and public squares were specifically barred to Jews. “Jews found seated upon these benches,” noted a newspaper account published in September 1942, “will be arrested and deported to forced labor in Germany, together with their families.”
In Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen’s documentary Occupied City, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, present and past continuously intersect and overlap in the capital of the Netherlands. The visuals all show contemporary Amsterdam – its streets, squares, 17th century buildings – while the narration points out,...
A park bench in the Dutch city today. A young couple embraces in glowing sunshine. Eight decades ago, benches in parks and public squares were specifically barred to Jews. “Jews found seated upon these benches,” noted a newspaper account published in September 1942, “will be arrested and deported to forced labor in Germany, together with their families.”
In Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen’s documentary Occupied City, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, present and past continuously intersect and overlap in the capital of the Netherlands. The visuals all show contemporary Amsterdam – its streets, squares, 17th century buildings – while the narration points out,...
- 5/11/2023
- by Matthew Carey
- Deadline Film + TV
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