“12 Years A Slave” filmmaker Steve McQueen didn’t set out to make back-to-back WWII movies, his upcoming WWII/Amsterdam doc, “Occupied City” which premiered at Cannes earlier this year, and his Apple TV+ WWII drama “Blitz,” but it just ended up happening that way.
“You plant seeds, and some come to fruition, and others don’t,” he told Variety earlier this year. “These two happened to blossom fairly close to each other.”
While “Blitz” is a ways off and won’t arrive until 2024 at some point, “Occupied City” which is a four-hour doc (and 22 minutes!) about the Nazi’s occupation of Amsterdam during WWII, but also a modern meditation and narrated exploration of how the city has persevered, through COVID-19 and beyond (read our review), comes out this Christmas.
An adaptation of his wife Bianca Stigter’s nonfiction tome, “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945,” McQueen has called Amsterdam home for years, so this city and subject is near and dear to his heart.
Here’s the official synopsis:
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. 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.
60,000 Jews were killed in Amsterdam in WII, but the film disorients by jumping between past and present; that’s the point
“What we try to do always as humans is to marry the two and make sense of the two together so that the narration illustrates the images,” the director told Variety. “But sometimes they don’t, and [in this film], sometimes one dominates more than the other, and that’s okay because it’s about living with ghosts and about the past and the present sort of merging.”
“Occupied City” comes to theaters Christmas Day via A24. Watch the first trailer below.
