This screening will be followed by a satellite Q&A with Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter.
Where do the memories of a city go? From Oscar- and BAFTA-winning filmmaker and Turner Prize-winning visual artist Steve McQueen comes this mesmerising and monumental excavation of how the past haunts our precarious present: mirroring it and warning us in plain sight.
In Occupied City, a searching camera sweeps through a vibrant contemporary Amsterdam while, at the same time, the film summons people and memories of the past under Nazi occupation within the city’s map and woven into the fabric of its streets and buildings. Using no archival footage, nor a single interview, McQueen opens up a poetic, dreamlike space where unthinkable history and hope for a new future co-exist.
The film is informed by the rigorously researched and lauded Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, written by historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, McQueen’s partner. The film travels to around 130 addresses in the city to uncover what occurred behind each window in those calamitous years. The emotional power of these stories accumulates throughout the film, laying bare the mechanics of both systematic oppression and sudden bravery; both calculated terror and life-saving luck; both ordinary and extraordinary ways of surviving.
The film's runtime is 266 mins, including a 15-min intermission halfway through. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter, broadcast live from the Barbican in London. The event will finish at 19:05.
