Watch the trailer for Steve McQueen’s Occupied City: epic documentary about the modern-day Nazi campaign against Amsterdam’s Jews

In Steve McQueen’s documentary there are echoes of Nazi terror in Amsterdam Occupied city, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Today, Regency Enterprises, A24 and Film4 released a trailer for the film ahead of its Christmas Day US theatrical release.

The documentary, which lasts more than four hours, goes square by square and street by street through contemporary Amsterdam and tracks where the German occupation forces committed atrocities against the local Jewish population. In May 1940, Nazi troops entered the city for the first time.

“The Nazis soon began to ban Jews from parks, swimming pools, shops, cafes and schools – from all public life,” says the story of actress Melanie Hyams, written by Dutch historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, McQueen’s wife. “In 1941 they started arresting people. The deportations began in 1942.”

Three quarters of Amsterdam’s Jewish population died in World War II and were sent to Nazi death camps. Sixty thousand people.

In the wake of the Hamas attack in Israel, the worst terrorist attack on Jews since World War II, the film will receive an even greater response this year.

“In Steve McQueen’s bravura documentary, the past collides with our uncertain present Occupied cityinformed by the book Atlas of an occupied city (Amsterdam 1940-1945) written by Bianca Stigter,” reads a press release for the film. “McQueen creates two interlocking portraits: a door-to-door excavation of the Nazi occupation that continues to plague his adopted homeland, and a vivid journey through the final years of pandemic and protest. What emerges is devastating and life-affirming, a sprawling meditation on memory, time and where we’re going.

McQueen was born in Great Britain but now lives in Amsterdam. In an interview with Deadline shortly before the Cannes premiere of Occupied cityHe explained how his experiences in his adopted homeland influenced the way he made the film.

“When I first came to Amsterdam – I didn’t live in an occupied country and grew up in London – it was very strange for me to walk around and see all these places that have this history behind them that related to Nazism, Netherlands . said McQueen. “Walking down a street, seeing a small statue and discovering that fifteen people had gathered here and were executed because someone had killed a German soldier was quite shocking to me. Hence the approach [of the film] had to happen somehow in the now.

Occupied city is produced by Floor Onrust, Steve McQueen, Anna Smith-Tenser and Bianca Stigter. Watch the trailer for the film above.