A river documentary of more than 4 hours, “Occupied City” is the new film by Steve McQueen, award-winning director for “12 Years A Slave”. And this ambitious project mixing two eras of Amsterdam deserves a look.
Two years after his powerful mini-series Small Axe, which should have been presented at the canceled 2020 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, Steve McQueen is back on the Croisette in Special Screenings in the Cannes Première Section.
The British director, crowned with success with 12 Years a Slave, Shame or even Hunger, offers a unique experience to festival-goers: Occupied City, a documentary which paints the crossed portraits of two generations of Amsterdammers, one under the German occupation during the Second World War and the other contemporary affected by the coronavirus epidemic.
The longest and most hypnotic film of the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival
If we do not count the screening of L’Amour fou by Jacques Rivette (1969) lasting 4h16 in the Cannes Classics section, Steve McQueen’s documentary is the longest new film presented in this 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Cannes with a duration of 4h06.
Interrupted by a fifteen-minute intermission, the screening of Occupied City is a particular and hypnotizing immersion. The British director chooses to confront two eras of his city of heart and adoption. Inspired by the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945) by Bianca Stigter, Steve McQueen takes his camera like a postcard and a love letter through the streets of Amsterdam, a major tourist and cultural city with a rich historical past.
His sharp but sober gaze highlights all the vitality of a city in constant mutation and perpetual movement. He films everything that animates a capital, from the most “banal” experience to the most spectacular: between moments of intimacy, family outings, lovers kissing or an older generation talking and repairs itself and protests and social movements, official political announcements and the consequences of the pandemic on the course of life.
Rare are the documentaries to capture with such sincerity, frontality and magnetism the crossings of solitary existence which inevitably collide with the rhythm of passing time. And it is another time that comes to confront these beautiful images: a time of horror, that of the Nazi occupation during the Second World War.
Following the information and sequencing of the book, the documentary takes us from address to address in the streets of Amsterdam thanks to the voiceover of Melanie Hyams, who tells us about the atrocity linked to the Jewish inhabitants who lived at the addresses mentioned.
Between denunciation, deportation, humiliation, intimidation until the fatal outcome, each story of the end of life told narrates another slice of contemporary life with a brutal split and paradoxically a coherent link, thanks to a montage reflection that causes us more than strange sensations between unease, sadness but also the exaltation of knowing that an era is over.
But if we are talking about a time that no longer exists, there is still a shadow that hangs over Amsterdam and haunts its every corner. Occupied City feels like a testimony to the past, a duty to remember and a reflection on time and the future. Even if we digest a lot of information in four hours (was it really necessary to push up to this duration?), we can only salute Steve McQueen’s exercise in style and observation.
The Occupied City documentary does not yet have a release date in France.