“It talks about what’s under the bed and what’s knocking on the door,” says British Steve McQueen, director of great films like ‘Hunger’ (2008) and Oscar-winning ’12 Years a Slave’ (2013). about a four-and-a-half hour documentary presented in a French competition these days. In other words: ‘The Occupied City’ comparing current Amsterdam to Amsterdam that was occupied by the Nazis eighty years agoinstead of being cleansed, he desires to meditate on hidden past filth and at the same time a terrible future.
Adapted from McQueen’s partner Bianca Stigter’s book ‘Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945’, the film functions more as an inventory of brutal deaths than a narrative to use. Its conceptual medium is the chronological and emotional inconsistency that the presented images and the narrative that structures them produce among themselves. McQueen’s camera captures joyful or beautiful moments in different environments of the city today.; meanwhile, an aseptic voice says the full name and summary story of someone who was once persecuted by the Nazis in each of these places. Stories of sadism and barbarism abound, but there are also those of fortified resistance.
Like this, It can be said that the ‘Occupied City’ tries to serve as a commemorative document of a place where around 60,000 Jews were killed at the time.. However, there are so many stories stacked on top of each other that they destroy each other; As soon as we draw our attention to the tragedy of such a victim, we are prompted to turn it into another victim, then another, and then the next. If we manage to retain a few or three of them, yes, it will probably seem worth the effort to McQueen.