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Occupied City

Directed by Steve McQueen

2023

UK, Netherlands, USA

262 minutes

Unclassified 15+

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Steve McQueen’s monumental and contemplative film looks for traces of Amsterdam’s past, when the Dutch city was under Nazi rule, in today’s city. Selected Cannes 2023.

Visual artist-turned-filmmaker McQueen won the inaugural Sydney Film Prize for his 2008 debut Hunger. Since then, his career has encompassed features (Academy Award Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave), television (Small Axe, 2020), and documentary (Grenfell, 2021). In his latest, McQueen traces the wartime history of his adopted city – from the 1940 Nazi invasion to the increasingly brutal repression and deportation of the Jewish population. Narration relates that history as images of modern-day Amsterdam (shot during the pandemic) fill the screen. Based on a book written by McQueen’s partner, Dutch writer-director Bianca Stigter (Three Minutes – A Lengthening, SFF 2022), this is a challenging but intensely rewarding opus.

Limited seats are available for patrons requiring access for wheelchairs, low vision and hearing loop. Please contact our ticketing team directly on 1300 733 733 or tickets@sff.org.au to complete your booking.

Moving to a formerly occupied country and city, [the recognition of a different lived experience] is very quick. You would go downtown and see a little engraving at the side of a building and go, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and someone tells you that’s where 50 people were rounded up, shot and killed because someone executed a German soldier. So, immediately you’re taken out of your comfort zone and confronted with the past within the presence of the city

McQueen quoted in Variety

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

Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter