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Behind the Scenes: Occupied City

Steve McQueen’s new documentary juxtaposes the past with the present and breaks the traditional narrative style to bring the facts of the holocaust into the light, writes Adrian Pennington.

 t seems we’ve now arrived at a new phase of storytelling about the Nazi era. While most of those with personal experience of the Holocaust have passed on, we are left with the trickier task of recalling history.

The Zone of Interest directed by Jonathan Glazer is one such attempt to keep that history potent and fellow British filmmaker Steve McQueen has produced another fresh perspective.

In his mammoth feature documentary Occupied City, McQueen literally puts the past in a perpetual dialogue with the present. Nothing in the film, which is entirely shot in Amsterdam, contains archive stills or colourised footage or stock imagery or talking heads – none of the material of a routine documentary about WWII. Instead...

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