Oscar-winning film director, Turner prize-winning visual artist, and knighted cultural icon in his native Britain, Steve McQueen has the clout and kudos to make a four-hours-plus documentary about the lingering ghosts of the Holocaust. Whether he actually should have done is still open to question after seeing Occupied City, a formally ambitious but baggy, repetitive rumination on Amsterdam’s hellish five years under wartime Nazi rule. Premiering out of competition in Cannes, this uneven blend of essay film and meditative artwork will undoubtedly find an audience based on its heavyweight themes and McQueen’s track record. But as a piece of cinema, it feels like a dry and disjointed experiment, oddly low on emotional and narrative power for such richly human, world-historical subject matter.
Occupied City is a filmic interpolation of the book Atlas van een bezette stad: Amsterdam 1940-1945 by McQueen’s long-time partner and producer, Bianca Stigter. This is the pair’s second Holocaust-themed documentary project following Stigter’s acclaimed Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2022), which McQueen produced. While both films are formally unorthodox treatments of related topics, McQueen’s sprawling symphony of a city is a much grander enterprise, attempting to map dozens of sites where the Nazis rounded up, imprisoned, deported and murdered around 60,000 Jews in Amsterdam alone. But it also highlights places where brave Dutch families sheltered Jewish neighbours, and where heroic resistance fighters from both communities struck back against the occupiers.
In a boldly counter-intuitive approach to historical documentary rules, McQueen uses no archive footage, no witnesses and no expert commentators in Occupied City. Instead his camera jumps between roughly 130 Amsterdam addresses where significant wartime events took place 80 years ago, from theatres to hospitals, public squares to swimming pools, art galleries to private apartments, including the sites of many buildings long since demolished. Accompanying this coolly detached contemporary reportage is a blankly factual voice-over by Melanie Hyams outlining what happened at each location during occupation: acts of unimaginable cruelty, stunning bravery, bitter betrayal and heroic defiance. Meanwhile, McQueen calmy observes today’s tourists and commuters, families skating on icy canals or playing together in snowy parks, groups of teenagers flirting and smoking and laughing. Juxtapositions between Amsterdam’s brutal Nazi past and current status as a liberal, multicultural bohemia make a heartening but fairly banal point.
There are plenty of harrowing, dramatic vignettes in Occupied City. Like the Nazi doctor who condemned a baby to death for having “Jewish ears”, or the sex worker deported for “carnal relations with non-Aryan persons”. But the film’s monotonous pacing and diffuse, non-linear chronology weakens its potential emotional force and narrative cohesion. With too little context, some huge events are reduced to soundbites, and minor personal stories sometimes given the same weight as major tragedies.
McQueen shot much of Occupied City during the Coronavirus outbreak, and he works hard here to draw parallels between the pandemic and the deadly plague of Nazi occupation, much like Albert Camus did in La Peste. With varying degrees of success, he also points to other echoes in contemporary Amsterdam street life: clips from political demonstrations against far-right parties make sense here, as do Ukrainian refugees arriving at Amsterdam as they flee Europe’s latest fascist occupation. But footage of anti-lockdown protests and climate justice marches feel like a strained allegory too far. History never truly repeats itself, of course, but it does sometimes rhyme.
Even at 262 minutes, Occupied City still leaves some intriguing tangents unexplored. For example, McQueen includes the Dutch state’s recent official apology over their use of slaves in former colony Suriname, which is tenuously linked to the film’s main theme because Holland’s wartime government in exile rejected Surinamese volunteer resistance fighters for fear of offending their racist South African allies. This fleeting detail points teasingly towards a very different occupation story, which could make a juicy documentary in its own right, but it has limited significance here.
Likewise the murder of Peter R. de Vries, a high-profile Dutch crime reporter who was gunned down on the street by gangland assassins in 2021. Footage of his funeral is included here without explanation or any clear link to the central occupation narrative. Occupied City could comfortably lose at least an hour of this extraneous material and still fulfil its key Holocaust chronicle mission. McQueen has made more rigorous and focussed documentaries before, after all, notably his BAFTA-winning BBC trilogy Uprising (2021). But perhaps he has now joined that untouchable pantheon of directors who are Too Big To Edit, which is never a healthy development for any film-maker.
A commendably bold concept, even if it falls uneasily between straight documentary and visual artwork, Occupied City works best as a heartfelt love letter to Amsterdam, McQueen’s adopted home town. Some of the film’s most beautiful moments come when he pulls away from historical material altogether, veering off on dreamy glides through the city’s nocturnal streets and mist-wreathed canals. An atmospheric and eclectic score by Oliver Coates, the young British electro-orchestral composer feted for his work on last year’s breakout Cannes hit Aftersun, shines most prominently in these more abstract sections.
Director: Steve McQueen
Screenwriter: Bianca Stitger, from her book Atlas van een bezette stad: Amsterdam 1940-1945
Narrator: Melanie Hyams
Cinematography: Lennert Hillege
Editing: Xander Nijsten, Steve McQueen
Music: Oliver Coates
Producers: Floor Onrust, Steve McQueen, Anna Smith-Tenser, Bianca Stigter
Production companies: Lammas Park (UK), Family Affair Films (NL), A24 (US), New Regency (US), Film4 (UK)
World sales: A24
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (out of competition)
In English, Dutch
262 minutes
