Steve McQueen’s Gripping Cannes Documentary ‘Occupied City’ Connects Today’s Amsterdam With Era Of Nazi Occupation

Documentary fans might be forgiven for nurturing a dream – that Cannes would follow the recent example of Venice and Berlin and award its top prize to a nonfiction film. Complete the documentary Triple Crown – the Golden Lion, the Golden Bear and the Palme d’or.

Taylor Swift’s tour is a true blockbuster.

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Somewhere in the third hour of Steve McQueen’s documentary “Occupied City,” the camera slowly dollies left over a list of names in glowing green print on a black background, enumerating the thousands of Jews deported from Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. A moment of silence in the audio mix announces this as an important shot, an occasion to consider the enormity of the loss that this four-and-a-half-hour film itemizes with near-comprehensive diligence.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Over the past 15 years, Steve McQueen has become one of my favorite filmmakers. He’s made only a handful of features, but in almost every case he takes a subject of extraordinary magnitude (the 1971 IRA prison hunger strike in “Hunger,” the complex horrors of slavery in “12 Years a Slave,” the collision of gritty city politics and feminine revolt in “Widows,” the epochal crackdown on West Indian immigrants in London in “Mangrove”) and uses it to box open your heart and mind. And he does it all with a storytelling vibrance that’s at once heady and populist. So when it was announced that McQueen would be directing his first documentary feature, and that it would tackle the subject of the Holocaust, dealing with the victims of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam (the city where McQueen now lives), my anticipation took the form of thinking: How, with a director of McQueen’s skill and imagination and gravity, could this be less than fascinating?

We walk among ghosts in cities, storied urban constructs with layers of misty memories one can sense in their distinct smells, and perceive in their dated cracks and imperfections. There are hundreds of thousands of such ghosts that haunt Steve McQueen’s audacious documentary essay “Occupied City,” a 2023 Cannes premiere that is as much a hypnotizing and cumulatively disquieting cinematic artifact about the Holocaust and World War II-era Amsterdam as it is a stubbornly single-minded historical art installation.The simplest way to describe “Occupied City” would be calling it an extensive guided tour of Amsterdam’s past that uses Bianca Stigter’s book, “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945)” as a compass.