Occupied City

Spoiler Alert

A cinema marathon for Occupied City, by Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter, based on her book, 'Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945'. It was 4¼ hours of a huge sequence of buildings, squares, parks and other places in Amsterdam, filmed with a voiceover about what happened in each of those places when the Nazis occupied the city. There was far, far too much information to take in, let alone remember, especially when what was going on in the modern day was engaging or complicated so it took a long while for for me to recognise some of the parallels being drawn: about protest, religion, education, confinement (some of the filming was during Covid lockdowns), race, weddings, politics and just the toings and froings of city life.

Even though I knew that Amsterdam was occupied and that Jewish people were persecuted and murdered, I emerged feeling quite shocked at the scale of it and at the realisation that actually I knew almost nothing. Collapsing history between then and now is an inspired way to show how prejudice, hatred and persecution emerge out of the mundane everyday.

As we all know if we look around us.