To that end, Occupied City shows many moments from Amsterdam’s very recent past – the far-right increasingly making its presence felt, and counterdemonstrations by supporters of democracy and liberal values. McQueen has told Deadline that while his wife focused in her book, in a sense, on the dead, he trained his attention on the living. In 2019 she published Atlas van een bezette stad: Amsterdam 1940-1945 ( Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945), a book that loosely inspired the documentary she wrote the text for the documentary. The Oscar-winning McQueen ( 12 Years a Slave), a UK native, has made Amsterdam his adopted home he lives there with his wife Bianca Stigter, the author, journalist and filmmaker who hails from the city. It gains a purchase on the psyche through the accumulated description of incidents from eight decades ago while Amsterdammers of today are seen going about their lives, seemingly unaware of what transpired under their feet. Occupied City unfolds not as a chronological narrative, but in anecdotal or episodic form.

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In the Vondelpark, people jog along leafy paths as we hear that under the occupation Jews were banned from sitting on park benches. We see the spot where, before the war, Anne Frank used to go for ice cream. There, a Dutch collaborator betrayed the location of a Jewish family in hiding, leading to their immediate deportation to the death camps. Here, a group of prisoners was executed in the street in retaliation for the killing of a German soldier. Or that a building on another street housed a Jewish couple who died by suicide rather than face extermination, leaving behind a note that invited neighbors to take whatever possessions they wished. For instance, at the opulent Concertgebouw we learn the invaders took a shine to the concert hall but made sure to cover up engravings of Felix Mendelssohn and other composers of Jewish ancestry. The remarkably bold approach, instead, uses only scenes of Amsterdam today while a narrator (Melanie Hyams) recounts in almost clinical fashion what took place virtually door to door and street to street during the Nazi occupation. Director Steve McQueen Courtesy of James Stopforth

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