Academy Award-winning director Steve McQueen is presenting his monumental 34-hour film "Occupied City" in its complete form for the first time at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. The epic work, which explores the stories of more than 2,000 Amsterdam locations during World War II and their present-day counterparts, will be projected continuously onto the museum's south façade from September 12, 2024, through January 25, 2026.

McQueen's connection to Amsterdam runs deep, dating back 40 years when he first moved to the city as a young artist. During visits to the Rijksmuseum, he would study Johannes Vermeer's 17th-century cityscapes and wonder about the hidden stories behind the mundane actions depicted in those masterpieces. "When you see a painting, you have no idea of the context or who the people are," McQueen told The Art Newspaper. "This is a mirror image of Amsterdam: it mirrors who we are today."

The ambitious project represents a collaboration between McQueen, who won an Oscar for "12 Years a Slave" in 2013 and gained international recognition after winning the Turner Prize in 1999, and historian-filmmaker Bianca Stigter. Stigter provided the historical foundation through her comprehensive book "Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945," which documents the sobering history of Nazi occupation in the Dutch capital. McQueen then captured contemporary footage of these same locations between 2020 and 2023, a period that coincided with COVID-19 lockdowns, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and climate change protests.

The film addresses one of history's darkest chapters, telling the stories of Nazi occupation during which three-quarters of the Dutch Jewish population was murdered, along with Roma, Sinti, and other dissidents. Eighty years after liberation, this massive work serves as both a memorial and a reflection on the layers of history that exist simultaneously in modern Amsterdam. The complete 34-hour version will be projected silently onto the Rijksmuseum's exterior, while an abbreviated version with sound and voiceover will be shown in the museum's auditorium.

Both McQueen and Stigter emphasize how Amsterdam's visible history often obscures its more traumatic past. "You are living in a 17th-century city [in Amsterdam]," McQueen explains. "There's not a lot of evidence of that particular past, [but] I felt that there were two or three narratives going on at the same time: of the 17th century, of the war and the present." Stigter adds that while Amsterdam's center showcases its Golden Age heritage through beautiful buildings and canals, "you can't see what happened when Anne Frank was hiding. This particular part of history is only visible in the monuments erected afterwards—it is kind of invisible to the eye at first glance."

The scale and duration of "Occupied City" are intentional artistic choices designed to convey the overwhelming magnitude of the wartime experience. For the original theatrical release, much of the footage McQueen and Stigter recorded had to be cut to fit a still-lengthy runtime of four hours and 26 minutes. However, McQueen's vision always encompassed featuring all 2,000-plus addresses to allow viewers to experience "something of the passing of history, the relationship between then and now." The director explains that the 34-hour format serves a specific purpose: "What I want to do with 34 hours was to allow time to pass, [time that] is bigger than all of us."

This presentation comes at a time when Dutch society has been reexamining its wartime history. While post-war narratives traditionally focused on stories of resistance and resilience, recent years have seen increased attention to collaboration with Nazi occupiers and the particular suffering endured by the Jewish population. McQueen deliberately avoids telling viewers what to think, instead allowing his film to reflect on fundamental questions about freedom and the hidden stories that lie beneath seemingly ordinary surfaces.

The Rijksmuseum installation represents a groundbreaking approach to both cinema and historical commemoration, transforming one of the Netherlands' most prestigious cultural institutions into a canvas for this extended meditation on memory, time, and place. By projecting the work onto the museum that houses those Vermeer paintings that first inspired his curiosity about Amsterdam's hidden stories, McQueen creates a full-circle moment that spans centuries of Dutch history and artistic expression.