Occupied City (2023)
Director: Steve McQueen Run Time: 266 min. Release Year: 2023
Starring: Melanie Hyams
Country: United Kingdom, Netherlands, United States
Language: English
Presentation includes a 15 minute intermission.
About the film:
Official Selection, 2023 Cannes Film Festival
The past collides with our precarious present in Steve McQueen’s bravura documentary Occupied City (2024), informed by the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945) written by Bianca Stigter. McQueen creates two interlocking portraits: a door-to-door excavation of the Nazi occupation that still haunts his adopted city, and a vivid journey through the last years of pandemic and protest. What emerges is both devastating and life-affirming, an expansive meditation on memory, time, and where we’re headed.
“Every film is a collection of moving images, but few are as moving as the sights that compose Occupied City… a chilling survey of how history’s repeating coil resides in unsuspecting places.”
—Robert Daniels, Roger Ebert
About the filmmaker:
Steve McQueen is a celebrated British visual artist and filmmaker. His art has been acquired by major institutions, including the Guggenheim, Tate and Centre Pompidou. In 1999, he received the Turner Prize, the highest award given to a British visual artist. His first feature film Hunger (2008), on the 1981 hunger strike of IRA member Bobby Sands, won him the Caméra d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. Shame (2011) premiered at Venice Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Golden Lion. With 12 Years a Slave (2013), McQueen won the BAFTA and Golden Globe for Best Film. He also became the first black filmmaker to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. His other projects include Widows (2018), the anthology Small Axe (2020), and the 3-part documentary series Uprising (2021). His latest feature, the WWII documentary Occupied City (2024), competed for The Golden Eye at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
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