Steve McQueen’s Cannes Doc ‘Occupied City’ Fuses Amsterdam To Nazi Era – Deadline

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, 17^th century buildings – while the narration points out, in even tones, what took place at those very locations during World War II when the Nazis ruled: arrests, executions, betrayals, acts of inhumanity and, sometimes, acts of heroism.

A U.K. native, McQueen lives in Amsterdam with his wife, Dutch journalist, author and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, who wrote the text of the documentary and co-produced the film.

“When I first came to Amsterdam — not living in an occupied country growing up in London — what sort of was very strange for me was walking around and seeing all these places that had this history behind it, which had to do with the Nazification of the Netherlands,” he tells Deadline. “Walking down a street and seeing a little statue and finding out that this is where 15 people were gathered up and executed because someone had assassinated a German soldier was quite shocking for me. So, therefore, the approach [of the film] had to happen somehow in the now.” 

There is not a single frame of WWII archive in Occupied City.

“It was all about what was going on now [rather than] what was going on 80 years ago, and to see those parallels,” McQueen says. “The whole idea of using archive footage didn’t even occur to me, because for me it was about the present rather than the past.”

A24 and New Regency are behind the documentary, which premieres in the Special Screenings section, out of competition. It is informed by Stigter’s 2019 book Atlas van een bezette stad: Amsterdam 1940-1945 [Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945)]. The work documents what happened during the occupation almost street to street, point to point – from Muiderpoort rail station, to Leidseplein Square, to the green spaces of the Vondelpark. Even at 560 pages it’s not meant to be taken as definitive and complete.

“It could have been 10 times thicker if I had my way,” Stigter says of her book, noting that her research came from ever-expanding sources. “There’s much more information available — new books have been written; archives have become much more accessible online. Reports from the Amsterdam police, from every precinct — you can search through them and type in names and find out what happened.”

McQueen filmed in many of those present-day locations where grim history had unfolded. Often, residents were unaware of the stunning events that had transpired around them.

“There weren’t a lot of people who knew,” McQueen says. “And sometimes people just didn’t want to know.”

Occupied City was shot during Covid and contains imagery from the immediate past – lockdown protests, vaccine distribution and vaccine paranoia. The director says he was struck by a certain link between the pandemic and that earlier era.

“In our lifetime, in my lifetime, there’s been nothing like it since the Second World War,” he observes. “And there was a communal aspect with it as well. Everyone was involved in this crisis. Often, this is something which happened somewhere far away you’re not even involved with. You turn on the TV and you turn it off. But this is something which we were all involved with. The fact that it was so focused, as it was in the Second World War, was actually a sort of hand-in-glove situation.”

The documentary runs just over four hours, with an intermission. The narration is by Melanie Hyams, a British actor, singer and writer based in Amsterdam. By design, her tone is matter of fact, dispassionate.

“It’s non-judgmental,” Stigter says. “That’s how I try to write it, in such a way that all the judgments and the emotions are for the viewer, and they are not handed to you, but you will find them yourself.”

McQueen adds, “In a way, this is not a morality tale. It’s a factual tale.” Of the narration, he says, “It’s a young woman’s voice and it’s just saying it as it is… it’s not dramatized. It’s information, but it’s not just throwaway… I feel that it’s almost like a schoolteacher telling you something, what happened on this planet called Earth.”

What’s currently happening on the planet inspires deep concern among many who view the Nazi era with revulsion. The documentary shows recent right-wing demonstrations, and counterdemonstrations by those alarmed about the threat to democracy. Right-wing nationalism has surged in Russia, parts of Eastern and Western Europe, Brazil and the United States.

“Amsterdam is local, but [this] is global,” McQueen says. “The microscope on this city sort of echoes what’s going on throughout the world. What happened in the [past] three years, it was like the whole of the ‘60s in three years — George Floyd, the climate crisis, the far right having been extremely vocal… It just amplified in some ways what we were talking about, which happened [80] years ago.”

During WW II, three-quarters of Amsterdam’s Jewish population perished, dispatched to Nazi death camps – 60,000 thousand people. Today, very few who escaped death at the time remain alive, given the passage of so many decades. Without the living to remind us of what they experienced, Occupied City charges itself with the excavation and preservation of history. And it serves as an implicit warning.

“The fact of the matter is this can happen again,” McQueen says. “It is not something which is sort of a fairytale, happened in the past. This could happen again quite easily. The parallels are there for everyone to see.”