Occupied City

Steve McQueen’s cinematic commemoration of the Holocaust offers a multidimensional experience full of gravity and sublimity.

Based on Bianca Stigter’s Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945, McQueen’s affecting, epic film observes 130 locations in present-day Amsterdam that relate directly to the Jewish community before and during the Nazi occupation of the city. As Melanie Hyams’ voiceover narrates what took place at each site, this monumental work quietly asks us to confront the range of dissonances between the traumatic past and a mundane present haunted, perhaps, by ghostly memories.