A24 revealed the official trailer for Occupied City, Academy Award Winner Steve McQueen’s documentary journey through Amsterdam, spanning World War II to the present day.
Narrated by Melanie Hyams, the film, clocking in at 4 hours 28 minutes, is based on the book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945 by Bianca Stigter (wife of Steve McQueen).
Release Date
Occupied City world premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and will be released in theaters on December 25.
Synopsis
The past collides with our precarious present in Steve McQueen’s bravura documentary Occupied City. From the streets of Amsterdam, McQueen creates two interlocking portraits: a vivid journey through the last years of pandemic and protest, and a door-to-door excavation of the Nazi occupation that still haunts his adopted city. What emerges is both devastating and life-affirming, an expansive meditation on memory, time, and where we’re headed.
Reviews
Calling the film “less than fascinating,” Variety review wrote, “But “Occupied City,” it’s my sad duty to report, is a good deal less than fascinating. I’ll be blunt: The film is a trial to sit through, and you feel that from almost the opening moments. McQueen based the movie on “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945,” a meticulously researched chronicle of life during World War II in Amsterdam that was compiled by his wife, the Dutch writer, historian, and filmmaker Bianca Stigter. The documentary is four hours long, and it consists almost entirely of dry descriptive passages, each one about a paragraph long, read by a narrator, in which we listen to the compressed story of one victim, or several related victims, of the Nazi regime.”
The Hollywood Reporter review felt a little differently writing, “Combining an elegantly lensed visual portrait of contemporary Amsterdam with a matter-of-fact oral account of the city during its occupation by Germany, McQueen’s four-plus-hour film shares the exhaustiveness of such Holocaust-chronicle magnum opuses as Max Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. But its perspective is entirely fresh, eschewing the standard, and more readily engrossing, nonfiction custom of first-person testimony and faces in dramatic close-up. Peering into the liminal place where history’s ghosts linger, McQueen stirs up something more complex than emotion.”
Official Trailer
Watch the official trailer for Occupied City.