{"id":128498,"date":"2025-09-10T21:41:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T21:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/128498\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T21:41:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T21:41:10","slug":"steve-mcqueens-34-hour-film-about-nazis-in-amsterdam-to-be-shown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/128498\/","title":{"rendered":"Steve McQueen\u2019s 34-hour film about Nazis in Amsterdam to be shown"},"content":{"rendered":"

A 34-hour documentary film by the British director Steve McQueen charting the German occupation of Amsterdam, the Holocaust and Dutch resistance has opened on the fa\u00e7ade of the national museum of the Netherlands.<\/p>\n

Occupied City tells the story of \u201coccupation, persecution and freedom\u201d through more than 2,000 addresses in Amsterdam, a city famous for the serene beauty of its 17th century townhouses and canals.<\/p>\n

Shown continuously on a giant screen dominating the front of Amsterdam\u2019s Rijksmuseum, the film \u201cholds up a mirror to the city\u201d, said McQueen, 55, who divides his time between London and the Dutch capital.<\/p>\n

\"Steve<\/p>\n

Steve McQueen\u2019s film was inspired by his wife Bianca Stigter\u2019s book Atlas of an Occupied City: 1940-1945<\/p>\n

DAVID NIVIERE\/ABACA PRESS\/ALAMY<\/p>\n

\u2022 Steve McQueen: \u2018People have been deaf to antisemitism\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re looking at the same perspectives that people looked at then,\u201d he told The Times.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just felt when I was coming from London, and was here for the first time, that there were these parallel lives going on. The same doorways, the same sort of building, the same sight lines, perspective and such. It is interesting to feel that you\u2019re living with the past in a real way, an everyday way. Living in Amsterdam feels like living with ghosts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inside the museum, the film, originally made in 2023 but never before shown in its full length, is accompanied by a matter-of-fact but often harrowing voiceover by Melanie Hyams, a British actress and writer based in Amsterdam.<\/p>\n

Shot on deserted streets during the Covid pandemic, the film has a haunting quality as hours of footage portray contemporary Amsterdam, \u201cfrom the mundane to the monumental\u201d, and also captures protests against lockdown measures. <\/p>\n

Overlying the contemporary footage, the words reveal often hidden and forgotten stories of oppression, betrayal, such as that of Anne Frank<\/a>\u2019s family, terror and death as well as resistance, including civil disobedience, in a small country where there was no escape.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like an archaeological dig, isn\u2019t it, because you see the 17th century, but then we\u2019re talking about something which happened 80 or 85 years ago,\u201d said McQueen.<\/p>\n

Atlas of an Occupied City: 1940-1945 by Bianca Stigter, 61, McQueen\u2019s Dutch wife, is the inspiration for the film; a monumental book, published in 2019, that used letters, diaries, police reports and newspapers, legal and illegal underground publications to uncover the city\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really try to get a lot of direct quotes from people that lived through it, that might have been victims then or manage to survive or resist. So you really hear those voices, very loud and clear,\u201d Stigter said.<\/p>\n

In 1940 the German occupiers set out to transform the Netherlands into a model \u201cnational socialist\u201d or Nazi state, including the dispossession and destruction of Amsterdam\u2019s Jews.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

McQueen\u2019s film was made in 2023 but has never before been shown in full<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

The city\u2019s Jewish population was forced to live in restricted areas, people were stripped of their jobs and possessions, then rounded up in raids before being dispatched to a Westerbork, a Dutch transit concentration camp.<\/p>\n

Some 100,000 Jews, including the Frank family, passed though the camp before being sent to killing centres, primarily Auschwitz and Sobibor in occupied Poland. <\/p>\n

Only 5,000 survived and by 1945, three-quarters of Dutch Jews had been exterminated including about 60,000 from Amsterdam, a grim backdrop to the city\u2019s history of occupation. <\/p>\n

\u2022 Occupied City review \u2014 Steve McQueen\u2019s grim four-hour documentary<\/a><\/p>\n

While there was collaboration, particularly by homegrown Dutch Nazis and many in authority, including in Amsterdam\u2019s municipality, there was resistance, including in February 1941 a general strike at the treatment of Jews which was rapidly and brutally crushed.<\/p>\n

In an occupied country, with borders entirely surrounded by German occupied countries or Germany itself, there was nowhere to run for the Dutch resistance who harboured an estimated 25,000 Jews, including many children.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re here to show beauty but we\u2019re also there to show the hidden scars of history because this is what we are as humans,\u201d said Taco Dibbits, the museum\u2019s director. \u201cAs a Brit living in Amsterdam, McQueen allows us to see our own present and past through different eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Occupied City will be shown continuously on the south fa\u00e7ade of the Rijksmuseum from Sep 12 to Jan 26 2025, with a voiceover version running inside. The museum will stay open for 36 hours for a screening of the entire film on Oct 11<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 34-hour documentary film by the British director Steve McQueen charting the German occupation of Amsterdam, the Holocaust…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128499,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-128498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}