Mary McNamara: It's hard to watch a 4-hour documentary on Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. That's the point
CANNES, France — British director Steve McQueen knows his documentary "Occupied City," which premiered on the first day of this year's Cannes Festival, may not be what people expect. From him, or from a documentary.
The form is well represented at this year's festival — there are three in competition — but none is as epic in scope or avant-garde in structure as McQueen's.
Based on the Dutch-language book "Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945," by his wife, Bianca Stigter, it is a four-plus-hour-long, street-by-street, building-by-building chronicle of what happened in Amsterdam during the German occupation and what each of those places looks like now.
As the camera captures modern scenes of specific locations all over Amsterdam, narrator Melanie Hyams describes how each figured in the invasion, occupation and deportation of 80% of the city's Jewish
