‘Occupied City’ Review: Steve McQueen’s Cannes Documentary On Nazi Occupation Of Amsterdam Takes Its Place Among Great WW II-Themed Films
deadline.comIn cinematic form, how do you tell history without archive footage? Occupied City shows how it can be done, and to what effect.
Steve McQueen’s audacious documentary, which premiered at Cannes today in the festival’s Special Screenings section, undertakes a portrait of Amsterdam during the Dutch city’s occupation by the Nazis from 1940-45.
But it does so without making use of a single frame of film or stills from the era itself – no German tanks rumbling over the thoroughfares, no jackbooted troops on patrol, no black-and-white imagery of terrified civilians running for safety.
The remarkably bold approach, instead, uses only scenes of Amsterdam today while a narrator (Melanie Hyams) recounts in almost clinical fashion what took place virtually door to door and street to street during the Nazi occupation.
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