Occupied City

The streets of present-day Amsterdam. As the camera films buildings, parks, cafés and people, a voice-over recounts what happened at those same addresses between 1940 and 1945: who lived there, who was rounded up, who was killed, which building was demolished. The film is not interested in images of the past. It is interested in the invisibility of the past: it uses no archive footage at all. All we have is the city as it is now, with history carried by the voice; the audience looks at an empty doorway and hears what happened behind it. The form pairs that choice with a merciless running time. The cut shown at Cannes ran close to four and a half hours, and the narration is deliberately flat, moving like a list, because the subject is a list. The source is Bianca Stigter's book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945. Stigter is also the director's wife and wrote the film. Steve McQueen directed. It was shot between 2020 and 2023, so pandemic restrictions, protests and demonstrations enter the record too, and the history of the present gets written into the film. Who it is for: anyone interested in memory, architecture and the history of the Second World War, and viewers of experimental documentary. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot take the length. The film is built on repetition and offers no dramatic build.