Steve McQueen to screen 34-hour film Occupied City on the Rijksmuseum's façade
Publication date: 10 September 2025 - 10:27
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam presents a 34-hour version of the British director and artist Steve McQueen’s epic film Occupied City. McQueen, who won an Oscar for his film 12 Years a Slave, has created two interlocking portraits: a door-to-door excavation of the occupation during World War II that still haunts the city today, and a vivid journey through the years of the pandemic. One version of the extraordinary work, Occupied City (still), will be shown continuously on the south façade of the museum from 12 September 2025 to 25 January 2026. In the auditorium of the Rijksmuseum a version of the 34-hour film with sound and voice-over will be shown during the museum’s opening hours. The film covers more than 2000 addresses and is based on Atlas of an Occupied City. Amsterdam 1940-1945, by the historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter. The presentation coincides with Amsterdam’s 750th anniversary and the commemoration of 80 years of liberation.
The work invites reflection on themes such as occupation, persecution and freedom. The two versions of Occupied City act differently. Occupied City (still) which is mounted on the façade of the Rijksmuseum, holds up a mirror to the city. It presents the daily life of contemporary Amsterdam, which sits on 750 years of history. At its core is the magnitude of what has taken place right here during the Second World War. You couldn’t possibly hold it all in your head and the passage of time has covered most of it. Living in Amsterdam feels like living with ghosts. There are always two or three parallel narratives unfolding at once. The past is always present.
Steve McQueen
Collaborating with Steve McQueen has long been a cherished wish. In Occupied City, McQueen powerfully interweaves the invisible scars of the Second World War with the contemporary rhythm of Amsterdam. As a Brit living in Amsterdam, he allows us to see our own present and past through different eyes.
Taco Dibbits – General Director of the Rijksmuseum
Silent
The silent version of the film that is shown on the façade of the Rijksmuseum, Occupied City (still), is a portrait of contemporary Amsterdam in all its facets, from the mundane to the monumental, from the ordinary to the extraordinary. We see people celebrating, commemorating and protesting; daydreaming, waiting, working and playing. From the outskirts to the centre, Amsterdam is seen to be alive. The film was shot between 2020 and 2023, as the COVID pandemic took place as well as the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and Climate Change marches.
Occupation
But the work also incorporates an older history. At the centre of the film is Amsterdam’s occupation during the Second World War. In the Rijksmuseum’s auditorium the film will be shown with an English voice-over and Dutch subtitles. This version reveals the human stories and tragedies resulting from occupation, oppression, terror and the persecution of Jews and other groups by the Nazi regime, stories that lie hidden behind the façades, streets and squares of the city.
2000 addresses
The film travels to over 2000 addresses across the city to uncover what took place behind each façade in the years of the Nazi occupation. The emotional power of these stories accumulates over the course of the film and what emerges is both devastating and life-affirming, an expansive meditation on time and memory.
Full Screening of Occupied City
On the weekend of October 11th and 12th, the Rijksmuseum will screen the entire 34-hour film Occupied City, complete with sound and narration, in its entirety. The screening begins on Saturday morning at 9.30 in the Rijksmuseum auditorium and runs until Sunday evening. Tickets can be ordered soon on the Rijksmuseum website.
Collaboration
This collaboration continues a rich tradition of the Rijksmuseum working with contemporary artists, as with the current show with Fiona Tan (Monomania, 2025) and previously with Damien Hirst (For the Love of God, 2008), Anselm Kiefer (La berceuse (for Van Gogh), 2010); Anish Kapoor (Internal Object in Three Parts, 2015) and Rineke Dijkstra (Night Watching, 2019).
The exhibition of Occupied City in the Rijksmuseum is made possible with the support of the VriendenLoterij.
Occupied City
Directed by: Steve McQueen
Year of production: 2023
Country: Netherlands, United Kingdom
Duration: 34 hours
Notes to Editors
Steve McQueen
Steve McQueen was born in London in 1969. Surveys of his work have been held at the Art Institute of Chicago and Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel (2012–13); Tate Modern, London (2020); and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2022). Recent solo presentations include those at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); the Art Institute of Chicago (2017); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017–18); Tate Britain, London (2019–21); Serpentine Gallery, London (2023); Dia Beacon, New York (2024-2025) and Dia Chelsea (2024-2025) Schaulager, Basel (2025). McQueen has participated in Documenta X (1997) and XI (2002), as well as the Venice Biennale (2003, 2007, 2013, and 2015), representing Great Britain in 2009. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Turner Prize (1999); W. E. B. Du Bois Medal, Harvard University (2014); and Johannes Vermeer Award (2016). McQueen was recently awarded The 2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Visual Arts. He was declared Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2002, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2011, and Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2020.
McQueen directed the feature films Hunger (2008), Shame (2011), 12 Years a Slave (2014), and Widows (2018); as well as the series Small Axe (2020), an anthology of five films shown on the BBC and Amazon; and Uprising (2021), a three-part documentary series for the BBC. His documentary Occupied City (2023) is based on the book Atlas of an Occupied City. Amsterdam 1940-1945, 2019, by Bianca Stigter. McQueen's latest film Blitz was released in November 2024. McQueen won the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Hunger in 2008 and an Oscar for Best Motion Picture for 12 Years a Slave in 2014.
Atlas of an Occupied City. Amsterdam 1940-1945
Atlas van een bezette stad. Amsterdam 1940-1945 by Bianca Stigter was published by Atlas Contact in 2019. This monumental book is full of quotes from the people who survived or were murdered, from letters, diaries, police reports and newspapers, legal and illegal. The Atlas is richly illustrated with photos and maps from the war years. Area by area, street by street, house by house and sometimes even floor by floor it shows the extremes of life in the city under occupation.
About the Occupation of Amsterdam during WWII
The 750-year-old, canal-studded city of Amsterdam attracted immigrants, refugees, and artists. Having maintained strict neutrality through WWI, the Netherlands attempted to do the same at the start of WWII, even as Nazis marched across Europe, dismantling democracies and unearthing latent fascist support. But on 10 May 1940, Germany invaded. After five days of fighting, the Dutch armed forces capitulated, Queen Wilhelmina fled to London, and by 15 May, Nazi troops were rolling over the Berlage Bridge into Amsterdam.
The occupier set out to remake the Netherlands into a national socialist state, an aim that included purging the country of its Jewish, Sinti, and Roma people, as well as all dissenters. As elsewhere in Europe, the process began with the identification and registration of Jews. Then came the systematic separation of Jewish people from their neighbours and the organic life of the city. Jews were forced to live in restricted areas, stripped of their jobs and possessions, subjected to harrowing raids, and sent to labour camps. In July 1942, mass deportations began as Germans dispatched, little by little, nearly the entire Jewish population to transit camp Westerbork, first opened in 1939 by the Dutch as a refugee camp for Jews fleeing Germany. From there, Jews were sent on weekly trains to killing centres, primarily Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor in occupied Poland, where the majority were killed upon arrival. Of the more than 100,000 Jews who passed through Westerbork (including diarist Anne Frank), around 5,000 survived. By the end of the war, the Netherlands would suffer the highest death rate of Jewish people in Western Europe, with three-quarters of the populace perishing, including around 60,000 from Amsterdam.
Amsterdam residents faced stark choices. Some collaborated, betraying neighbours, friends, even family, to the authorities. Others turned their heads from the unfolding horror, while still others resigned themselves to the barest cooperation. But as the reality of repression set in, resistance mounted in the city. In February 1941, the residents of Amsterdam and neighbouring towns protested the treatment of Jews with a general strike, before Nazi reprisals squelched the rebellion. Public transportation, factories, shipyards, and public services ground to a halt. It was a rare people-powered disruption of Nazi rule, albeit short-lived. Some Dutch citizens risked their lives to conceal and aid those in mortal danger.
Because the Netherlands’ borders were entirely shared with German-controlled countries, and its seaport heavily defended by Nazis, escape was nearly impossible. This left hiding and deception as the primary means of survival. The Dutch underground harboured an estimated 25,000 Jews, including many children, during the occupation, with a third still being caught and murdered. Approximately 3,000 managed to find passage out of the country, often thanks to forged papers. Many who survived did so due to being in a mixed marriage, per Nazi rules.
During Occupation, food was rationed. In late 1944, Amsterdam descended into the Hunger Winter, a season of deadly, manmade famine caused by, among other things, a Nazi blockade of transport of food and fuel for six weeks. The effects were extreme and punishing. Amsterdam’s desperate populace chopped down trees, smashed furniture, and stole wooden frames from houses left empty by the deported to make firewood. Around 4,000 people died in Amsterdam—up to 20,000 people in The Netherlands as a whole—of deprivation, a rare instance of mass starvation in a modern city. Soup kitchens and foreign aid brought some limited emergency relief. But the reprieve would only come on 5 May 1945, the day the Armistice was signed, with the Allies fully liberating the Netherlands, coming into Amsterdam on 8 May.
