This film plays twice, be sure to select correct date!
Director: Steve McQueen
Netherlands, United Kingdom & United States | 2023 | Documentary | English | 266 mins
“Extraordinary…intense, absorbing and epically scaled chronicle” - New York Times
This remarkable documentary, the latest from British director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), performs a number of cinematic miracles. Based on the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945) by Bianca Stigter, Occupied City is a minutely detailed, door-to-door view of the Nazi occupation of World War II that manages to connect the present to that vivid past without a single talking-head interview or a single frame of archival material. Instead, McQueen uses everyday scenes from contemporary Amsterdam to chronicle the fate of the city’s Jewish population during World War II. It’s a staggering piece of storytelling.
This very long movie (four-and-a-half-hours, plus intermission) also does a trick with time. As Manohla Dargis points out in her The New York Times rave, “Time is stretched differently in Occupied City and passes far more quickly than you might imagine, despite the running time.”
It’s one of the most audacious, striking and visionary films of the year, and we’re proud to present Steve McQueen’s Occupied City in The Screening Room.
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