OCCUPIED CITY (15)

In Steve McQueen’s own words, his cinematic take on the Holocaust holds “the weight of what happened”. Taking as its starting point Bianca Stigter’s Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945, it visits 130 (edited down from 2,000) locations in present-day Amsterdam that the Jewish community inhabited before and during the Nazi occupation of the city. As Melanie Hyams’ voiceover quietly and matter-of-factly narrates what took place at each site, we confront all sorts of dissonance between the traumatic past and a mundane present, threaded through with new preoccupations and causes. Out of a simple but rigorous process comes something moving, nuanced and monumental in sheer detail.