You cannot activate it all the time, but sometimes it’s interesting to see past and present colliding.” “Seeing the film, you are aware of the past that is around you. “Not a history lesson, an experience,“ Stigter said. Like a classical concert, you drift away in one place and come back into another and that’s part of the experience. If you forget things that’s OK because of the magnitude. “The weight of what happened was so heavy you can’t hold it in your head forever. “The way Bianca wrote the text was very factual, so I knew I wanted that - not uncompassionate but matter-of-fact, and then we’re moving on,” he said. This is precisely the effect McQueen planned. Are we supposed to be concentrating on the trees or the forest? One contrast after another after another pits your eyes against your ears until it is difficult to keep the images from distracting from the text, and vice versa, to know how to process the information. The normality of the modern scenes, gorgeously shot on 35 mm, inevitably offers a disturbing contrast with the narration - a busy school that served as a torture center, a cozy apartment where a Jewish family was discovered and sent to a camp, people ice-skating on frozen canals where the bodies of those who died in hiding were dumped and many committed suicide. It is a challenging film to watch and not just because of its subject matter, or even its length. The form is well represented at this year's festival - there are three in competition - but none is as epic in scope or avant-garde in structure as McQueen's.īased on the Dutch-language book “Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945,” by his wife, Bianca Stigter, it is a four-plus hour-long, street-by-street, building-by-building chronicle of what happened in Amsterdam during the German occupation and what each of those places looks like now.Īs the camera captures modern scenes of specific locations all over Amsterdam, narrator Melanie Hyams describes how each figured in the invasion, occupation and deportation of 80% of the city’s Jewish residents, many of whom were murdered in concentration camps.
British director Steve McQueen knows his documentary “Occupied City,” which premiered on the first day of this year's Cannes Festival, may not be what people expect.
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