Firstly, I appreciate filmmaker Steve McQueen's style and intentions on providing an uncomfortable, yet, interesting historical story about WWII and how past and present contexts of the situations. McQueen uses his style to show the city of Amsterdam and the past with gorgeous camerawork, interesting narration and discusses about her environment throughout.
Throughout, there are some great uses of music and the style approach without using archival footage and focusing on modern settings and scenarios added a lot of interesting themes and discussions about the context to be explored. I found the choices to be interesting.
It's a 4-hour documentary and I understand the intentions of McQueen's vision. Unfortunately, for a four hour long journey, it's not fully justified because some of the discussions and concepts end up feeling repetitive. The historical discussions are interesting but some of the discussions and ideas felt as if they are being repeated over and over again. For instance, Shoah is a 10-hour documentary but every single moment in Shoah was necessary and important to the context of the setting. Occupied City unfortunately isn't able to fully grasp everything rightfully and ends up being more of a patience testing rather then an experience.
Overall, the documentary isn't bad as I do appreciate it. But I found myself thinking this documentary could have been trimmed towards 2 hours and a half to become a perfect movie.
