”Living in Amsterdam feels like living with ghosts. There are always two or three parallel narratives unfolding at once. The past is always present.” Steve McQueen
Seventy percent of the Jewish population of Amsterdam was wiped out during the Nazi occupation versus 30% in occupied Paris. We are reminded of that shocking fact and why, among many others while watching Occupied City, a 34-hour film created by Turner prize-winning artist and Academy Award-winning British Director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Shame, Hunger, The Blitz). The film is being projected continuously on the south facade of the Rijksmuseum until 25 January 2026. And, in the auditorium, the film with sound and narration, is being shown during the museum’s opening hours.
2,000 Locations
This enthralling documentary, shot during the pandemic, eerily evokes ghosts of the past by showing 2,000 addresses throughout Amsterdam with World War II connections. It spans the 1940 German invasion, the deportation of Jews to concentration camps and covers the nefarious actions of the Dutch Nazi party (NSB). It’s not all bad news though as we learn of sites of resistance and underground newspapers and activities. We are told about the wartime history of each of the place by narrator, Melanie Hyams, a young British Jew also living in the Netherlands. Shot in present time with no archival footage used, the daily life of contemporary Amsterdam, which sits on 750 years of history is also on show. The film is based on the book, Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945 by the historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter. The presentation coincides with Amsterdam’s 750th anniversary this year and the commemoration of 80 years of liberation from Nazi rule.
Unlike in standard documentaries using archival footage and interviews, the viewer of this film sees only present day images while the texts and the narrator describe the past, offering a sense of where the Germans were in the city, where the holocaust was organised, where the resistance gathered and where people hid. Sometimes the film footage shows current events or scenes that eerily echo the past; at other times there is no obvious connection.
Steve McQueen says,“the work invites reflection on themes such as occupation, persecution and freedom.” Where today’s ordinary activities take place: going to work and school, gathering in parks, and swimming, horrific things often took place. We are shown Gerrit van der Veen College, once a place of interrogation, a Nazi torture chamber; a house in the red light district where a Jewish prostitute was arrested and taken to a concentration camp for consorting with a German soldier and today’s students at the University of Amsterdam where students protested in 1942 against Jewish students being forced to wear a yellow star. Steve McQueen said that the history of all of the 2,ooo places he shot was surprising but he was particularly struck by “the fact that people thought they had no future and that they took their lives, their children’s lives, that was pretty confrontational but that wasn’t uncommon, unfortunately.”
Silence Versus Sound
The silent version of the film that is shown on the façade of the Rijksmuseum, Occupied City (still), is a portrait of contemporary Amsterdam, from the mundane and ordinary to the extraordinary. None of the backstories are apparent. The film was shot between 2020 and 2023, as the COVID pandemic took place as well as the Black Lives Matters demonstrations and Climate Change marches. In watching the silent version, you may not realise what happened in the past but you do get a sense of history repeating itself. The version of the film with sound and text in the auditorium reveals the human stories and tragedies resulting from occupation, oppression, terror and the persecution of Jews and other groups by the Nazi regime, stories that lie hidden behind the façades, streets and squares of the city.
A shorter version (4.5 hours) of the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. And it was distributed in cinemas in the UK by Modern Films and in the United States by A24. But the plan was always to show the entire film as an art installation, with all 2,000 locations that took 34 hours to film.
Occupied City, directed by Steve McQueen, will be shown silently on the facade of the Rijksmuseum, Museumstraat 1, Amsterdam until January 25, 2026. Included with admission is access to screenings of parts of the film with sound in the museum’s theater, during opening hours every weekend. And a full screening of the entire 34 hour film will be shown on the weekend of October 11 and 12th, 2025.