Occupied City [2023]

 Steve McQueen’s shattering “city symphony” Occupied City is a powerful act of remembering, and rigorous preservation of cultural memory of Amsterdam during Nazi occupation. Based on “Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945” – the encyclopaedic tome by Dutch historian Bianca Stigter, who’s also McQueen’s wife and creative partner – the British filmmaker shot a staggering 36 hours of footage capturing all the 2000-plus addresses recorded in it, which he then edited into this mammoth 4-hour documentary covering 130 of those sites. This extraordinary memorialization of that grotesque period was made particularly haunting by its juxtaposition of ghosts of the past – catalogued by Melanie Hyams’s eerily neutral narration – with images of present-day Amsterdam that he shot in 35mm through the pandemic and beyond. The voiceover chronicled anecdotes of execution and deportation, collusion and betrayal, desperation and survival, and even defiance and resistance; the visuals, conversely, ranged from freewheeling depictions of people engaged in activities unsettlingly incongruous to what had transpired at those locations, albeit separated by time, to present-day demonstrations, including dissenting against lockdowns, acknowledging Dutch slave-trades, climate justice rallies, and solidarity  with immigrant and Palestinian rights. These, in turn, were interspersed with couple of hypnotic tracking shots of night and daytime streets. While McQueen’s avoidance of archival footage has drawn comparisons with Lanzamann’s monumental Holocaust treatise Shoah, I found it formally closer to Perel’s scalding docu Corporate Accountability – a cutting exposé on how corporations enabled repression and enforced disappearances during the military dictatorship in Argentina – in their smashing of past and present. The director, incidentally, came to know during the filming that the schools that his daughter and son attend were once the SS headquarters and a Nazi-run prison, respectively.

Director: Steve McQueen

Genre: Documentary/Political History

Language: English/Dutch

Country: Netherlands

The Palestinians [1975]

 Dutch documentary filmmaker and photographer Johan van der Keuken, as an essay in Jump Cut appropriately observed about him, “works on the margins of the film industry and lets those on the margins of society whose voices are not usually heard speak through his films.” That statement is equally applicable to his stirring docu The Palestinians, which was, in parallel, deeply moving and filled with urgency. In this daring example of radical cinema – one that was so politically progressive that many of his fellow left-wing friends were perturbed by it – he boldly took the side of the forcibly displaced and infinitely persecuted Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, amidst squalor, desperation, despair, anger and incessant violence. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place – or, more specifically, the apartheid settler-colonialism of the Israeli occupation and the callous indifference of the Lebanese power structure – thus making them a tragically stateless people. Keuken punctuated the docu-essay with reflections on the industrialized massacre of the Jewish people by European fascism, which ironically segued into occupation, brutality, injustice and dislocation of the Palestinian people. With the context set and his political position clearly established, the guerilla work – shot on location in 1975, with grainy visuals manifesting the best of underground reportage and a startling sense of here-and-now – he trained his lens on individual and collective stories. We see women lamenting the destruction of their homes and the death of their kids; protesters defiantly displaying solidarity on the streets; old men pensively reminiscing their lost homes and lands; rebel fighters training by the day and breaking bread in the evening; and a schoolteacher cogently ensuring the kids know their history of oppression by heart.

Director: Johan van der Keuken

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Short Film

Language: Dutch/Arabic

Country: Netherlands/Palestine

Black Book (Zwartboek) [2006]

Controversial director Paul Verhoeven’s foray back to his native The Netherlands after spending two decades at Hollywood has resulted in the bold, slick and engaging war-time thriller Black Book. The movie clearly shows that the Dutch auteur’s ability to command big budgets, make good old-fashioned thrillers and his unquenchable knack for shocking his audience without as much batting an eyelid has not been dampened. The story, set during the near-end of the bloody World War II, follows a stunning (and wildly promiscuous) Jewish dame Rachel’s desperate struggle to stay alive at Hitler-ruled Holland, seek justice for the brutal slaying of her family through underground revolutionary movements, and survive (and prove her innocence) from the same guerrilla fighters after she falls for a Nazi officer Muntze and the two are nicely set-up by the vile, villainous immediate subordinate of the sympathetic Muntze. Some of the twists are very well concocted but for the final one which is too forced and uncalled for. Despite the unimpressive acting talents of the lead actress and a number of one-dimensional characters, the gorgeous production design and taut screenplay, in the expert (and surprisingly sympathetic) hands of the veteran director, have managed to engage the viewer insomuch as it is attractive to the eyes but not to the extent that he would ponder over it or would be staggering from its impact.









Director: Paul Verhoeven
Genre: Spy Thriller/War Drama/Action/Epic
Language: Dutch
Country: The Netherlands