Steve McQueen is in the process of promoting his long-term project, the documentary ‘Occupied City’.”It’s definitely fun, but it’s work,” the director, who finished editing, told Variety. “Hard work is always hard work. You can’t avoid it“, write down.

The British director, who was nominated for an Oscar for the film “12 Years a Slave” did not plan to constantly make films about the war.

“You plant seeds, and some bear fruit and some don’t,” he explained. The drama film “Blitz” and the documentary “Occupied City” are about World War II. “They happened to bloom quite close together“, he pointed out.

Blitz is set in London, which was bombed but never occupied by Germany during the war. By contrast, “Occupied City,” which has its world premiere today in Cannes’ Special Screenings section—is a narrative exploration of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam juxtaposed with images of the city today, during the year ravaged by Covid- 19.

By the end of World War II, the Netherlands had the highest Jewish death rate in Western Europe, with 75% of the Jewish population perishing, including more than 60,000 in Amsterdam alone.

The contrast of hearing the often harrowing history behind a postcode while simultaneously seeing the mundane flow of modern life can seem disorienting. That’s the point, explained Steve McQueen.

“What we always try to do as humans is marry the two and make sense of both together so that the narrative illustrates the images“, said the director.

“But sometimes it doesn’t in this film, sometimes one dominates more than the other, and that’s okay, because it’s about living with ghosts and merging the past and the present.”

“People were very receptive when we were filming because of the trauma he went through“, he emphasized. “Everyone has a story about war and occupation“, he added.

The documentary does not mention Anne Frank, who hid with her family for two years in a building that today functions as a Museum. “In a way, I wanted to keep her and other people’s stories in the present and not belong to the past,” explained the director.

Funded by A24 and New Regency, the 4 hour 22 minute documentary contains no interviews or archival footage, but is based on the illustrated book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945) written by the Dutch writer and director Bianca Ste