Academy Award Winner Steve McQueen’s monumental portrait of Amsterdam and the ghosts of World War II, Occupied City, is now available to watch at home.
Occupied City is a 2023 documentary film directed and produced by Steve McQueen and based on the book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945 by Bianca Stigter. It’s narrated by Melanie Hyams and is a co-production between the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the United States. It had its world premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival as a special screening, before It was released by A24 in the United States on December 25, 2023.
Rotten Tomatoes reported an approval rating of 65% based on 37 reviews with an average rating of 6.9/10. The website’s critics consensus reads, “Occupied City is an impressively ambitious attempt to connect the past with the present, although its repetitive approach and overwhelming length will be too much for many viewers.” Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 77 out of 100 based on 14 critics, indicating “generally favorable reviews”.
The Plot
The past collides with our precarious present in Steve McQueen’s bravura documentary Occupied City. From the streets of Amsterdam, McQueen creates two interlocking portraits: a vivid journey through the last years of pandemic and protest, and a door-to-door excavation of the Nazi occupation that still haunts his adopted city. What emerges is both devastating and life-affirming, an expansive meditation on memory, time, and where we’re headed.
Will you be giving this one a watch?
