Echoes of Nazi terror in Amsterdam reverberate through Steve McQueen’s documentary Occupied City, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Today, Regency Enterprises, A24 and Film4 dropped a trailer for the film ahead of its Christmas Day release in U.S. theaters.
The documentary, with a runtime of over four hours, goes square by square and street by street in present-day Amsterdam, tracing where the occupying German forces committed atrocities against the local Jewish population. Nazi troops first entered the city in May 1940.
“Soon, the Nazis started to ban Jews from parks, pools, shops, cafes and schools – from all public life,” notes the narration voiced by actress Melanie Hyams and written by Dutch historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, McQueen’s wife. “In 1941 they started rounding people up. In 1942 the deportations began.”
Three-quarters of Amsterdam’s Jewish population would perish during World War II, dispatched to Nazi death camps. Sixty thousand people.
The film is likely to take on even greater resonance this year coming after the Hamas attack in Israel, the worst terror attack on Jews since the Second World War.
“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,” a release about the film observes. “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.”
McQueen was born in the U.K. but now makes his home in Amsterdam. In an interview with Deadline just before the Cannes premiere of Occupied City, he explained how his experience in his adopted home influenced how he made the film.
“When I first came to Amsterdam — not living in an occupied country growing up in London — what 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,” McQueen said. “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.”
Occupied City is produced by Floor Onrust, Steve McQueen, Anna Smith-Tenser, and Bianca Stigter. Watch the film’s trailer above.
