Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter on Occupied City: ‘The history in this film isn’t neat’

Bringing up two children in Amsterdam, filmmaker Steve McQueen and his wife, historian Bianca Stigter, sent their oldest daughter to a well-regarded secondary school, Gerrit van der Veen College. Set on a pretty street in the Apollobuurt neighbourhood, it features in McQueen’s new documentary, Occupied City: a sweet scene of backpacks and lesson bells. But a voiceover talks of another presence, unseen by the students: the Holocaust.

The school, we learn, stands close to the site of an older one, requisitioned by the Nazis in 1942. It became the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, through which the SS rounded up Jewish Amsterdammers before deporting them to concentration camps. Meanwhile, on screen, teenagers bike off in bright sunshine.

I first meet McQueen and Stigter in London. “Things on your doorstep always bear closer examination,” the director says.

The couple sit side by side: Stigter wry, McQueen gregarious. “I’m going on again,” he says at one point. “You will edit this, won’t you?”

In Amsterdam, where they live, the 17th century is visible in every grand canal house. The city that endured Nazi occupation is less obvious. Buildings have been renamed, others demolished. But the period is now returned to life in Occupied City. In an epic then-and-now, the film juxtaposes scenes of the modern Dutch capital with a voiceover explaining, for instance, that this address housed the Nazi bureaucracy that ordered Amsterdam to align time zones with Berlin; or here was the home of a particular Jewish baby, detained, deported, then murdered in Auschwitz.

The film began as a book: Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, Stigter’s meticulous story of city houses and buildings under Nazi rule, published in 2019. The statistics of the period are stark. Some 75 per cent of the Netherlands’ prewar Jewish population was murdered; 60,000 people deported from Amsterdam alone. “I wanted to know what happened where,” she says. “So the book is part map, part time machine.”

It took much of the 2010s to write. Yet even before Stigter began work, McQueen says he too had been struck by the “ghosts” of the occupied past since moving to Amsterdam from London in 1996, when the pair became a couple. “There were always two narratives at once,” he says. In the midst of an acclaimed movie career that began with 2008’s Hunger, and alongside his long-standing work as a visual artist, he kept learning of fraught histories in the city around him. For years, he debated an artistic response, before a eureka moment while Stigter was still researching her book.

The couple have always discussed each other’s projects (it was Stigter who first found the 1853 memoir of the formerly enslaved Solomon Northup that inspired McQueen’s Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave). Now, he imagined the city’s double life on film: present-day Amsterdam captured in images, the past represented by the text his wife was writing elsewhere in their house. “You suddenly think: ‘Oh. Hello!’ Things are right under your nose sometimes,” he says.

He started shooting in early 2020, stepping instantly into the path of Covid. “I still wanted to get out there,” McQueen says. “If it’s raining, at least let me choose my raincoat, right?” Filming would continue into 2022, with the result also becoming a visual record of a tumultuous modern era. “The whole world happened in front of us,” McQueen says. We duly watch time-capsule scenes of vaccination programmes and Black Lives Matter protests. Sonically, though, we keep following the rolling voiceover of British filmmaker Melanie Hyams, speaking only of the horror that took place here between 1940 and 1945.

The effect can be hugely powerful. Disorienting too. I tell McQueen and Stigter that mentally tracking past and present together sometimes left me feeling like I was trying to pat my head and rub my stomach at once. They nod, enthused. “Because it’s hard to keep the past and present in the same frame,” McQueen says. “And the history in this film isn’t neat. It’s a cavalcade. That’s the truth of it.”

Truth is the watchword too for the portrait of gentile Amsterdam during the occupation. There is brave resistance — and antisemitic collaboration. But Hyams’ tone is emotionally neutral. That, Stigter says, was crucial. “With the book too, I tried to write purely factually. The emotion was left for the reader.”

Yet despite the dispassion, the film is bound up with the couple’s lives: the product of a creative and domestic marriage. McQueen makes a playful comparison to Lennon and McCartney. For him, the film mines many of the same themes of untold urban history that also inspired his television film series about London’s West Indian diaspora, Small Axe. “I always want to know what’s in the stones of a city.” (Since making Occupied City, McQueen has returned to London, though remaining with the second world war, for the forthcoming epic Blitz.)

For Stigter, the connection is still more direct. Her parents lived through the occupation as children. And Occupied City makes a fascinating contrast with her own debut film, 2021’s Three Minutes: A Lengthening, a documentary about a scrap of home movie shot in Poland, circa 1938, and the Jewish villagers glimpsed in it. In one project, we see almost nothing but archive; in the other, no archive at all. (McQueen says his wife’s text meant the new film “didn’t need it”.) “With me it is one thing or the other,” Stigter smiles.

That goes for the running time too. Three Minutes: A Lengthening ran to just 69 minutes; Occupied City unfolds over more than four hours. McQueen and Stigter know the heft is an inevitable talking point. “This movie couldn’t have been 90 minutes,” McQueen says. “It would have been a disservice. But also, I respect people’s time. This isn’t a film where you watch the first 10 minutes, get it, then have to sit through one long variation on a theme.”

The image and text keep colliding in new ways, Stigter says. “Exactly,” McQueen says. “You’re kept on your toes. So, yes, time is cheap, and this is an expensive bit of time. But it’s worth it, to quote L’Oréal.”

The film’s scale is such that we also now see a trace of history repeating in real time. For much of the shoot, modernity was mostly defined by Covid. Two years after McQueen started filming, however, events provided a mournful closing echo instead: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine creating new occupied cities, and a train of refugees into Amsterdam. “Filmmaking is such a strange ritual,” McQueen says. “Sometimes you put a camera in place, and you find you did it unknowingly right before the momentous happens. I don’t know how that happens. But it does.”

It kept happening even after the film was finished. I first talked to McQueen and Stigter at the beginning of October. Then, early reviews of the film had fixated on scenes of protests against Covid lockdowns, without a single mention of a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Dam Square, captured, like everything else, with a sense of neutral reportage. “Isn’t it weird?” McQueen said then. “Not one person has asked us about it.”

Within days, the Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza would provide the film with yet another tragic counterpoint. In our most recent conversation, McQueen returns to the subject: “The movie just feels even more urgent now, unfortunately.”

Since our first meeting, McQueen and Stigter have also spent months processing the Dutch election victory of Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom party (PVV) last November. Stigter says her lingering shock is tinged with weary realism. “Straight after the election, so many Dutch people asked, ‘but why?’ And there were many evasive answers. But the answer was simple: hostility to immigrants.”

Islamophobia and antisemitism are both now rising in the Netherlands, she says. She mentions local initiatives in Amsterdam to bring together Muslim and Jewish communities. “There are still a lot of good people in Amsterdam.” But the general mood in the city? “Apprehensive.”

“Things are heavy here now,” McQueen says. “If you’re a Muslim child, and the country’s biggest party is vocally anti-Muslim, who are you in that society? And in terms of the film, it leaves you feeling memories are short.” He circles back to our starting point: education. “They say people don’t learn from history. But what else are we going to learn from?”

‘Occupied City’ is in UK cinemas from February 9

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