Steve McQueen to project 34-hour film Occupied City on the façade of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum
The London-born filmmaker presents a monumental work exploring memory, wartime trauma and contemporary life
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam will screen Occupied City (still) — a 34-hour silent film by British director and artist Steve McQueen, who was born in London and now lives in the Netherlands. The work will be projected continuously on the museum’s south façade from 12 September 2025 to 25 January 2026.
Adapted from Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940–1945 by historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, McQueen’s film traces the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam through over 2,000 addresses across the city. Filmed between 2020 and 2023, it intertwines contemporary footage — recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests and climate demonstrations — with the haunting legacy of the Holocaust.
A version of the film with voiceover and sound will also screen daily inside the museum’s auditorium during regular opening hours.
McQueen describes Occupied City (still) as “a mirror to the city”. He adds:
“At its core is the magnitude of what has taken place right here during the Second World War. Living in Amsterdam feels like living with ghosts. There are always two or three parallel narratives unfolding at once. The past is always present.”
Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits said:
“As a Brit living in Amsterdam, McQueen allows us to see our own present and past through different eyes.”
The outdoor version of the film presents an evolving portrait of daily life — people working, resting, protesting, grieving. Inside the museum, the narrated version draws directly on Stigter’s research, giving voice to the human stories behind the doors of occupied Amsterdam: acts of resistance, loss, and the unrelenting machinery of persecution under Nazi rule.
Occupied City builds emotional power through its duration and detail. The sheer scale — over 2,000 locations, many filmed at the very sites where atrocities took place — forces reflection on what remains, and what has been erased.
McQueen, who won the Academy Award for 12 Years a Slave and the Turner Prize in 1999, continues his interest in political memory and structural violence. The film is part of the Rijksmuseum’s broader engagement with contemporary artists, following projects with Fiona Tan, Rineke Dijkstra and Anselm Kiefer.
The screening coincides with Amsterdam’s 750th anniversary and 80 years since the city’s liberation. During the Nazi occupation, more than 100,000 Dutch Jews were deported and murdered, including over 60,000 from Amsterdam alone — the highest death rate among Western European Jewish populations.
Filmed at a time of pandemic and protest, Occupied City draws uncomfortable parallels between past and present, and asks how cities carry — or conceal — their histories.
Elena Leo is the Arts & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
