Holocaust past meets Amsterdam present in Steve McQueen’s ‘Occupied City’

By JAKE COYLE
AP Film Writer

In “Occupied City,” a young woman with an even voice narrates Nazi encounters and crimes throughout Amsterdam during World War II. The accounts go address by address, and so does director Steve McQueen’s camera. Only the images that play throughout “Occupied City” are of modern day Amsterdam. In the roving four hour-plus documentary McQueen, the “12 Years a Slave” director, made with his partner, the Dutch documentarian and author Bianca Stigter, past and present are fused — or at least provocatively juxtaposed. McQueen tells The Associated Press “Occupied City” is a way to preserve memories of the Nazi atrocities for a time when those who remember them are no longer alive.