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.
Following its World Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2023, Spotlight screening at the New York Film Festival, UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival and Dutch premiere at IDFA, Modern Films has announced that Steve McQueen’s OCCUPIED CITY will open in cinemas across the UK and Ireland on 9th February 2024.
A special event screening will take place on Sunday 11th February including a live Q&A with McQueen and Stigter, to be broadcast from the Barbican to cinemas nationwide.
Where do the memories of a city go? From Oscar- and BAFTA-winning filmmaker and Turner Prize-winning visual artist Steve McQueen comes this mesmerising and monumental excavation of how the past haunts our precarious present: mirroring it and warning us in plain sight.
In OCCUPIED CITY, a searching camera sweeps through a vibrant Amsterdam in 2020 reeling from the global pandemic. At the same time, the film summons the people and memories of the past, laid over the city’s map and woven into the fabric of its streets and buildings. Out of the combination comes a transformative effect. As the film overlays an unprecedented time that we all just lived through atop door-by-door accounts from the city’s devastating Nazi occupation – tales of Jewish persecution, of resistance, collaboration, valour, and denial – McQueen opens up a poetic, dreamlike space where unthinkable history and hope for a new future co-exist.
The film is informed by the rigorously researched and lauded Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945), written by historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, director of Three Minutes – A Lengthening and McQueen’s partner. The film travels to around 130 addresses in the city to uncover what occurred behind each window in those calamitous years. The emotional power of these stories accumulates over the course of the film, laying bare the mechanics of both systematic oppression and sudden bravery; both calculated terror and life-saving luck; both ordinary and extraordinary ways of surviving.
Yet, the film’s hypnotic imagery is entirely of our times, persistently moving forward. McQueen uses no archival footage, nor a single interview. Instead, the panoramas are awash in the rhythms of modern daily life, shot through at times with the eerie time-distortion of covid’s protocols and losses, and the sudden eruption of fervid street protests—for freedom, against racism, and to halt climate change.
By interlacing our fragile, complicated past with the uncertainty of now and the urgency of what comes next, OCCUPIED CITY seems to reconfigure the context of all three. Some images and stories mysteriously connect. Others clang and shudder, as the film becomes a startling and original meditation on time, memory, and immediacy—history as something all around us, and something we continually create. But it is also a highly personal journey, as we weave in and out of houses and remembrances, in and out of grief, indignation, and moments of joy, hearing history, seeing the recent world, and wondering about tomorrow.
OCCUPIED CITY will be released in the UK and Ireland by Modern Films on 9th February 2023.
The film is screened in cinemas with a 15-minute interval.
See: modernfilms.com/occupiedcity for up-to-date information on screenings and events
Occupied City is produced by Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter along with Lammas Park’s Anna Smith Tenser and Family Affair Film’s Floor Onrust, in partnership with A24, Film4 and Regency Enterprises.
About
Academy Award winner and British Film Institute Fellow Steve McQueen is a British artist and
filmmaker. His critically acclaimed first feature Hunger (2008), starring Michael Fassbender as an IRA
hunger-striker, won the Camera D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He re-teamed with Fassbender for his
follow up feature Shame (2011) for which Fassbender won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival for
Best Actor. McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave (2013) dominated the awards season, winning the Academy
Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA and AAFCA Awards for Best Picture while McQueen received DGA,
Academy, BAFTA and Golden Globe directing nods. His fourth feature Widows (2018) was one of the
best reviewed films of the year and starred Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Elizabeth Debicki and Michelle
Rodriguez. In 2020, McQueen’s anthology series Small Axe, comprising five original films about
resilience and triumph in London’s West Indian community from the late 1960s through the early 80s,
was awarded Best Picture by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, while McQueen received the
Storyteller Award for series at the 16th Annual Final Draft Awards. Small Axe was also the recipient of
fifteen BAFTA Television nominations. Three of the five films in the series played at the 58th New York
Film Festival with Lovers Rock opening the fest, with two of the five selected for the 2020 Cannes Film
Festival.
Past documentary works include the BAFTA-winning three-part series Uprising (2021) for the BBC
about the tragedy and aftermath of the New Cross fire and subsequent deaths of 13 young black British
people in 1981 that went on to define race relations in the UK for a generation. McQueen directed and
produced Uprising. He also served as a co-producer on Three Minutes – A Lengthening (2021), directed
and co-written by Bianca Stigter.
The recipient of many accolades for his work as a visual artist, McQueen was awarded with the Turner
Prize in 1999, and represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009. He has exhibited and held
his artwork in major museums around the world. A retrospective was exhibited at the Art Institute of
Chicago and at the Schaulager in Basel. In 2016, he received the Johannes Vermeer Award at the Hague.
Tate Modern and Tate Britain were home to two critically acclaimed shows in 2019/2020, Year 3 and a
Retrospective Steve McQueen. In 2017, McQueen made an artwork in response to the fire that took
place earlier that year on 14 June at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, West London. 72 people died
in the tragedy. McQueen showed Grenfell for the first time at The Serpentine Gallery in London in April
through 10 May 2023. In 2020, McQueen was awarded a knighthood in the Queen’s New Year’s
Honours List for his services to the Arts.
BIANCA STIGTER: TEXTS WRITTEN BY & INFORMED BY THE BOOK ATLAS OF AN OCCUPIED
CITY: AMSTERDAM 1940-1945:
Bianca Stigter is an historian and cultural critic. She writes for Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and
published three books of essays. Stigter was an associate producer on Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a
Slave and Widows. In 2019 she published the book Atlas van een bezette stad. Amsterdam 1940-1945
(Atlas of an Occupied City. Amsterdam 1940-1945). In 2021 she directed the documentary Three
Minutes – A Lengthening, which premiered in the Giornate degli Autori at the Venice Film Festival and
was selected for the festivals of Telluride, Toronto, Sundance, as well as IDFA and DocAviv. Three
Minutes – A Lengthening won the 2022 Yad Vashem Award for cinematic excellence in a Holocaust-related Documentary. It played to great critical acclaim in cinemas in the United States, the United
Kingdom, the Netherlands and other countries.
Atlas van een bezette stad. Amsterdam 1940-1945 was published in the Netherlands by AtlasContact.
