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- A24
- 4 h 6 m
- A24
- 4 h 6 m
Summary The past collides with the present in this excavation of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam: a journey from World War II to recent years of pandemic and protest and a provocative, life-affirming reflection on memory, time and what's to come.
Directed By: Steve McQueen
Written By: Bianca Stigter
- A24
- 4 h 6 m
- A24
- 4 h 6 m
Occupied City
74
User Score
Available after undefined 0, 0
Summary The past collides with the present in this excavation of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam: a journey from World War II to recent years of pandemic and protest and a provocative, life-affirming reflection on memory, time and what's to come.
Directed By: Steve McQueen
Written By: Bianca Stigter
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally favorable
Based on 13 Critic Reviews
74
69% Positive
9 Reviews
9 Reviews
31% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Generally favorable
Based on 13 Critic Reviews
74
69% Positive
9 Reviews
9 Reviews
31% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Its perspective is entirely fresh, eschewing the standard, and more readily engrossing, nonfiction custom of first-person testimony and faces in dramatic close-up. Peering into the liminal place where history’s ghosts linger, McQueen stirs up something more complex than emotion.
What makes Occupied City a challenge — and a welcome, worthwhile one — isn’t its leisurely four-and-a-half-hour running time (including intermission), but rather its formal daring.
After four hours, there’s no sense you know the city, present or past, or that you ever will understand it. Would maps and timelines make it any more ‘satisfying’? Instead, you are haunted by it..
For the most part, sound and image are irreconcilable, so you find yourself either listening in horror or watching with pleasure, only for the spell to be broken by some eye or ear-catching detail in the other temporal strand.
McQueen’s pointillistic approach invites our minds to wander freely between then and now, his film less interested in shuddering at the specifics of its awful facts than it is in probing our ever-evolving relationship to them, but the documentary’s monotonousness resists deeper engagement.
Occupied City starts off strong, but after the intermission, you can feel how aimless the documentary is at times, with the final act feeling almost excruciatingly long.
In Occupied City, you don’t feel history evolving. You feel it withering, becoming smaller and more abstract, almost bureaucratic in its detachment, until it feels as if the life had been drained out of it.
User Reviews
tbd
Production Company
20th Century Studios,
A24,
Family Affair Films,
Film4,
Lammas Park,
New Regency Productions
Release Date undefined 0, 0
Duration 4 h 6 m
Genres
Awards
Cannes Film Festival
• 1 Nomination
