The news of the release follows the documentary’s World Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2023, Spotlight screening at the New York Film Festival, UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival and Dutch premiere at IDFA.
It has been announced that Steve McQueen’s new documentary Occupied City will be released in cinemas in the UK & Ireland on the 9th February 2024.
A special event screening will take place on Sunday 11th February including a live Q&A with McQueen and Stigter, to be broadcast from the Barbican to cinemas nationwide.
Informed by the book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945 written by Bianca Stigter, Occupied City sees the past mix with the present as Steve 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.
In OCCUPIED CITY, a searching camera sweeps through a vibrant Amsterdam in 2020 reeling from the global pandemic. At the same time, the film summons the people and memories of the past, laid over the city’s map and woven into the fabric of its streets and buildings. Out of the combination comes a transformative effect. As the film overlays an unprecedented time that we all just lived through atop door-by-door accounts from the city’s devastating Nazi occupation – tales of resistance, collaboration, valour, and denial – McQueen opens up a poetic, dreamlike space where unthinkable history and hope for a new future co-exist.
The film is informed by the thoroughly researched and lauded Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945), written by historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, director of Three
Minutes – A Lengthening and 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 over the course of the film.
Occupied City is produced by Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter along with Lammas Park’s Anna Smith Tenser and Family Affair Film’s Floor Onrust, in partnership with A24, Film4 and Regency Enterprises.
The film will be screened in cinemas with a 15 minute interval and available to watch in cinemas from the 9th February 2024.