Occupied City

I can't believe this film even got made. It's like a weird elementary school book report assignment.

It starts with a woman stating an address, telling you in two sentences what happened there, and then stating another address. For FOUR hours.

No interviews. No maps of the city so you can even see how these addresses relate to each other. No historic footage. Nothing. Half the time she tells the address, says what happened, then says "demolished." At which point you realize you're not even seeing the address she's talking about.

If you like memorizing disconnected sound bytes with unrelated montages of Amsterdam in 2020, this film is for you. I can't believe I paid money for this. In fact, I'm going back to Amazon to try to get a refund. It's that bad.

WWII, Nazis, the fate of my people are of and have always been of intense interest to me. Films depicting the war from all angles have intrigued and peaked my attention for decades.

Having lived in Amsterdam for 13 years, on the so-called Gold Coast where many Jews were banished, I had to see this film. What a disappointment. I waited for the punchline which never came. It was just a long boring mental monologue of names, dates, family, and jobs of individuals in Amsterdam who were murdered. We saw where they lived but nothing else. Feeling and emotion were not part of this film.

Juxtaposed against 2021 how the lockdown was the first time since WWII in Dutch history where people were confined was a poor comparison to the Holocaust and felt disingenuous and insulting. No one was "murdered" for staying indoors or not wearing a mask. Health crises and pandemics have been scourging humans forever but to compare it with the Holocaust was just fantastical.

Firstly, I appreciate filmmaker Steve McQueen's style and intentions on providing an uncomfortable, yet, interesting historical story about WWII and how past and present contexts of the situations. McQueen uses his style to show the city of Amsterdam and the past with gorgeous camerawork, interesting narration and discusses about her environment throughout.

Throughout, there are some great uses of music and the style approach without using archival footage and focusing on modern settings and scenarios added a lot of interesting themes and discussions about the context to be explored. I found the choices to be interesting.

It's a 4-hour documentary and I understand the intentions of McQueen's vision. Unfortunately, for a four hour long journey, it's not fully justified because some of the discussions and concepts end up feeling repetitive. The historical discussions are interesting but some of the discussions and ideas felt as if they are being repeated over and over again. For instance, Shoah is a 10-hour documentary but every single moment in Shoah was necessary and important to the context of the setting. Occupied City unfortunately isn't able to fully grasp everything rightfully and ends up being more of a patience testing rather then an experience.

Overall, the documentary isn't bad as I do appreciate it. But I found myself thinking this documentary could have been trimmed towards 2 hours and a half to become a perfect movie.

This is a great but uncoventional movie/ It last long and you need a concentration span which is not trained in the current tik tok generation. It tells the story of the occupation of Amsterdam during world war II which was the longest occupied city during WW II and also the highest amount of german soldiers per capita which made resitance very difficult in the densly populated Netherlands.

The horrors of the occupation are told in a cool, emotionless voice while showing the liberty the Amsterdam and dutch people enjoy nowadays. The failure to submit the dutch to the rigourus regime and the passive and active resistence of the dutch are well told and also how much it has cost in human lives. The result is that Amsterdam is a multicultural city and also the jewish population is recovering from the persecution.

In one way I admire this movie. The intent of showing the buried and uncomfortable history of a major European city and simultaneously showing the conflicts and protests that have become part of the present day is admirable.

McQueen manages to show modern Amsterdam on a city-wide civic scale as well as a personal, private scale and gives equal importance to both.

I also find the focus on multiculturalism admirable. We spend time with people with North African, East Asian, Afro-Colonial & Palestinian heritages. As well as the modern Jewish community of Amsterdam.

But it's very repetitive. The historical anecdotes are very compelling, but after a while they seem to be the same type of story over and over. We also didn't need the journeys of the roofs of trams in Amsterdam.

Bottom line, this documentary DID NOT need to be over 4 hours long. It turns what could have been a truly meditative experience into an endurance test.