‘Occupied City’ Director Steve McQueen Says Coffee and Pee Breaks ‘Become Part of the Experience’ of Watching His 4-Hour Holocaust Doc

What if the locations of our most comforting sojourns (museums, ice cream parlors, parks) were also uncovered to be the sites of atrocity and anguish in the past? That is the central conceit of A24’s “Occupied City,” Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen’s stirring, enveloping four-and-a-half-hour nonfiction film (releasing on Dec. 25). The project is informed by his spouse Bianca Stigter’s (“Three Minutes: A Lengthening”) book “Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945.”

The “12 Years a Slave” and “Hunger” director turns his camera to modern-day Amsterdam to recount the Nazi occupation of the region during World War II. It’s told exclusively in captured footage of modern everyday Amsterdammers— largely seen during the early COVID pandemic — as a narrator (Melanie Hyams) recounts the fates of dozens of inhabitants whose lives were destroyed by barbarism in the exact spots the stories depict.