Occupied City + ScreenTalk with Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter

A searching camera sweeps through a vibrant contemporary Amsterdam while, at the same time, the film summons people and memories of the past under Nazi occupation within the city’s map and woven into the fabric of its streets and buildings. 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, McQueen’s partner.

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.