A24 has dropped a new trailer for the Academy Award-winner Steve McQueen’s (“12 YEARS A SLAVE” ) latest film, “OCCUPIED CITY.”
From 1940 – 1945, Nazis occupied the magnificent city of Amsterdam, which suffered mass deportations, collaborators, a general strike uprising, and a crippling blockade that resulted in the “Hunger Winter” famine of 1944 – 45. Informed by historian/filmmaker Bianca Stigter’s Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940 – 1945, “OCCUPIED CITY” is a monumental excavation of the city’s wartime history.
Eschewing the conventions of World War II documentaries (interviews, archival footage, photographs), Steve McQueen (“12 YEARS A SLAVE“) presents only contemporary footage of the city, along with hauntingly matter-of-fact narration, to trace the effects of the occupation on human lives block by block, address by address.
Shot during the early days of COVID, McQueen captures a city under its first curfew since the war and beset by protests of the government’s handling of the pandemic, climate change, and racial injustice. His audacious approach evokes how the history of atrocities – as well as acts of heroism – hover over the freedoms of modern citizens.
According to Tomis Laffly from The Wrap, “A hypnotizing and cumulatively disquieting cinematic artifact… The entire film is built on a correlation between the past and present, and the ghostly empty streets of Covid times deepens this linkage.
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The film will open on Dec 25th.