premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May<\/a>, from Stigter\u2019s book, \u201cAtlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945,\u201d a 560-page historical encyclopedia that was published in Dutch in 2019, and she is one of the movie\u2019s producers.<\/p>\nStigter\u2019s reference book records the geographical dimensions of that period of Nazi rule in Amsterdam \u2014 where the bombs dropped, where rallies were held \u2014 but it also memorializes places where Dutch people suffered and died: soup kitchens during the 1944 to 1945 famine known as the Hunger Winter; apartments where Jewish families committed suicide; and public squares, train stations, a theater and a day care center where Jews were held before their deportation to concentration camps.<\/p>\n
In \u201cOccupied City,\u201d Stigter\u2019s text is read out in unemotional voice-over by the British actor Melanie Hyams, while the camera shows scenes from contemporary Amsterdam. But because it was mostly shot from 2020 to 2022, much of the footage captures the city during Covid-19 lockdowns.<\/p>\n
McQueen, who was born and raised in London, is both a filmmaker and a Turner Prize-winning visual artist, recognized by Queen Elizabeth with a knighthood in 2022. But he has lived a more under-the-radar life in Amsterdam, Stigter\u2019s hometown, since the late 1990s. The couple raised their two children in the city, though they declined to discuss how they met or when, precisely, they got married.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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He said that he has always felt Amsterdam\u2019s cityscape represented layers of history that must be excavated, from the 17th century, when it was the hub of Golden Age Holland, up through the horrors of World War II. \u201cThere are always archaeological digs going on in your brain as you walk the streets,\u201d he said. He\u2019d long wanted to make a film that simultaneously engaged the present and the past.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Around 2004, McQueen said, he was conceptualizing a film that might somehow draw the city\u2019s World War II past into the contemporary moment.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had this idea to physically map one image over the other,\u201d McQueen said, \u201cto illuminate the ghosts from the past.\u201d He heard the tapping of keys from the next room, he recalled, where Stigter was writing the first version of her \u201cAtlas,\u201d and thought: \u201cWhat if the past is text and the images of now are now?\u201d<\/p>\n
McQueen set out to shoot every address in Stigter\u2019s book \u2014 more than 2,000 locations \u2014 and the filming was planned long before any signs of the pandemic. But when lockdowns in the Netherlands began in March 2020, McQueen decided to go on undeterred.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was like the way Dutch people still just go out into the streets and cycle when it\u2019s raining \u2014 the weather doesn\u2019t change the plan,\u201d he said. \u201cWe just had to embrace it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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For two and a half years, McQueen and his crew shot on location, producing 960,000 feet of film, he said, far more than he would need, even for a long documentary. Stigter sometimes attended the filming, but not always. \u201cIt felt a little like I was in the way,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Some of the shots show quotidian activities, suggesting that life goes on, oblivious to the past. We see a shuttered H&M store, where we learn that young Dutch volunteers once stood in line to register for the Waffen S.S. People joyfully play in the snow and walk their dogs in the Sarphatipark, where one of the final roundups of Jews took place in 1943.<\/p>\n
But filming during the pandemic meant that the life captured by the cameras wasn\u2019t ever entirely ordinary. Sometimes, the drama unfolding in the present moment reminds us that we remain as vulnerable to catastrophe as ever, as in a scene where elderly Dutch citizens line up for Covid vaccinations.<\/p>\n
At other times, wartime themes and contemporary visuals converge in unusual and unsettling ways, like when hundreds of unmasked protesters gather on Museumplein, a central square in the museum district, in early 2021, to decry the new masking regulations. The protesters are forced out of the square by police on horseback, and using water cannons and dogs.<\/p>\n
It is ambiguous whether the footage is suggesting a link between the World War II era and Covid times. This is a touchy moral question, because protesters and far-right Dutch politicians have, in recent years, made false equivalencies between the Holocaust and the government\u2019s Covid-19 regulations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n