In Steve McQueen’s 4-hour Cannes entry ‘Occupied City,’ Holocaust past meets Amsterdam present

CANNES, France — In Steve McQueen’s “Occupied City,” a young woman with an even voice narrates, with rigorous specificity, Nazi encounters and crimes throughout Amsterdam during World War II. The accounts go address by address, and so does McQueen’s camera.

Yet the images that play throughout “Occupied City” are of modern day Amsterdam. In the roving, 4 hour-plus documentary made by McQueen, the “12 Years a Slave” director, with his partner, the Dutch documentarian and author Bianca Stigter, past and present are fused — or at least provocatively juxtaposed.

The effect can be startling, stirring and confounding. An elderly woman shifts to country music in an apartment complex where, we’re told, a family was once arrested and sent to a concentration camp. A radio throbs with Bob Marley in a park where German officer once resided in the surrounding townhouses. A boy plays a virtual reality videogame where an execution took place.

“It’s almost like once upon a time there was this place called Earth,” McQueen said in an interview alongside Stigter.

“Occupied City,” which premiered Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, includes no archival footage or talking heads. Instead, it invites the viewer to consider the sometimes hard-to-fathom distance between one of history’s darkest chapters and now. It’s about remembering and forgetting.

“You want to wake people up and at the same time take them with you,” says McQueen, a British expat who has made Amsterdam his adoptive home with Stigter and their children.

The film is rooted in Stigter’s illustrated book “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945),” which likewise catalogued the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam and the methodical murdering of its Jewish citizens. Stigter and McQueen have researched their own address. A few doors down, McQueen says, a Jewish man in hiding paid for his keep by teaching a family’s child how to play piano. Their lessons were conducted quietly by tapping on the table.

“Occupied City” details how the Nazi occupation unfolded, door to door, name by name. At the same time, it can be hard to reconcile those accounts with the accompanying footage that captures mostly civic harmony throughout modern Amsterdam. Though “Occupied City,” which A24 financed and is distributing, touches on monuments and museums to the Holocaust, its imagery mostly lingers on the thriving life of a city. Life moves along, relentlessly.

“The present erases history,” says McQueen….