Viewing Steve McQueen’s haunting documentary Occupied City: a multi-layered must-watch

Steve McQueen’s eagerly-awaited documentary Occupied City explores humanity at both its cruellest and kindest. The Turner Prize-winning artist roams his lens over the streets and buildings of an Amsterdam reeling from the pandemic in 2020, while telling stories of the Nazi occupation that still haunt his adoptive city. Scenes from the extraordinary times we have all lived through overlay door-to-door accounts of resistance, collaboration, bravery and denial during the occupation in this devastating but life-affirming collision of the past and present.

The film draws on the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945), written by historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, who is also McQueen’s partner. It travels to around 130 addresses in the city to uncover what went on behind closed doors, including Gerrit van der Veen College, a school attended by the couple’s daughter that once served as the HQ of the Sicherheitspolizei, or German security police. No archival footage or interviews are included, however; instead a voiceover by Melanie Hyams, a young British-Jewish actor, reads descriptions of each place, and who lived or worked there, as McQueen pans around the contemporary scene. His images are spliced with the sudden eruption of street protests calling for freedom, while decrying racism and climate change. History is all around us, it seems, and we are constantly creating it. Occupied City is a multi-layered must watch – just be prepared for a four-hour stint.