Reframing The Occupied City as a Modern Canadian and American viewer might see it
Steve McQueen, the British filmmaker behind Hunger and the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, offers a four and a half hour documentary that has lately found a home in a French festival lineup. The work, titled The Occupied City, places today’s Amsterdam side by side with the city under Nazi occupation eighty years ago. Rather than simply cleansing memory, McQueen invites a meditation on the concealed stains of the past while casting a stark light on a potential, troubling future.
Adapted from Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, the film reads less like a conventional narrative and more like an inventory of brutal deaths. Its form hinges on a tension between temporal sequence and emotional weight, a tension that emerges from the way images are organized alongside a calm, almost clinical narration that names individuals who endured persecution during the occupation. The result is a mosaic where moments of beauty in contemporary Amsterdam coexist with the solemn specifics of each person described in the voiceover. Across the city’s varied spaces, stories of cruelty and resilience intersect in uneasy harmony.
Viewed through a Canadian or American lens, The Occupied City can be understood as a commemorative archive. It marks a place where roughly 60,000 Jews perished during a dark chapter in history. Yet the film does not settle easily into one narrative. Instead, it piles stories upon stories, inviting spectators to witness tragedy while also confronting how memory can fracture under its own weight. When a handful of portraits or episodes are retained, the film can feel like a purposeful act of remembrance rather than a mere catalog of loss. That, for McQueen, may be the measure of whether the work achieves its intent.
For audiences in North America and beyond, the documentary challenges viewers to balance reverence with critical reflection. It does not offer simple redemption or linear storytelling. The result is a probing experience that asks what it means to bear witness to atrocity while continuing to inhabit the living city today. In this way, the film aligns with McQueen’s broader artistic project: to illuminate the pressure points where memory, history, and present reality intersect, often in uncomfortable ways. The Occupied City becomes less about a single completed record and more about a continuous process of remembering, documenting, and questioning what we choose to carry forward. [Cited: McQueen’s approach to memory and form, as discussed in public discussions of the project]
In the end, the work asks not only how a city remembers, but how viewers absorb and act on what they witness. It is a careful, sometimes jarring invitation to stay with discomfort, to examine the ways in which historical trauma can echo into current times, and to consider what a modern audience owes to those whose lives and deaths are sifted through the gaze of a camera. The Occupied City thus stands as both a legacy document and a living prompt for ongoing dialogue about memory, justice, and collective responsibility.