A four hour documentary is always going to have its challenges. Steve McQueen (Hunger (2008)) takes a deep dive into the recorded history of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam by overlaying a narrated retelling with a river of footage of the city in 2020 and 2021.

It’s a brave conceit as the people and places we are hearing about are only ephemerally shown. With a structure of geography, we are told what happened in a particular address – building, square, park, river – while we see that location now. The building won’t necessarily still be there but sometimes we are inside the particular apartment on the corresponding floor that has replaced it.

The visuals are an intimate, often dispassionate, observation of the city now. Diverse, noisy, full of loud youths and bicycles and elderly people exercising. It’s the time of COVID lock downs so we also see curfews, overlaid with stories of curfews for Jewish people in the 1940s, and we see protests and police intimidation while we hear about families hiding beneath floorboards. It is serendipitous, I expect, as the protests against fascism with the restriction on movement and mandated vaccines seem a pale thing when you hear what fascism is really like.

The stories are a tumult of awful tragedy and repetition. This person hid, helped others, was betrayed, was deported, was murdered in Auschwitz or Sobibor or Mauthausen. There are some survivors who lived to tell the story but so many dead. We hear of the mechanism of gradual dehumanisation – small changes, some hope, then theft of houses, belongings and rights. We hear of the resistance but also the informers. We see the monuments and Anne Frank’s name and story as one of tens of thousands.

It’s not as maudlin as it might sound. The footage we watch has moments of humour – a barrel organ played by iPhone, a bike crash, a child’s tantrum, and the notes of Waltzing Matilda playing. We also see the funeral of assassinated journalist Peter de Vries, held in a theatre that had its own stories of murder.

Every 40 minutes or so, the camera breaks free and takes us on a swooping journey against a musical score, points of mindfulness against the quiet onslaught of information and sadness. The dislocation between audio and visual is an interesting one, as is the choice to have the film run for four hours. Hearing about tragedy but not seeing it seems to mimic how we go about our lives, knowing that terrible things are happening in other parts of the world but not really engaging with the personal. We are distracted by what we see and often that is just about our day to day existence. It feels like McQueen is forcing us to sit with that understanding for four hours.

What was remarkable was only a handful of the packed cinema left during the 266 minute run and even when the credits rolled, most sat silent. It made me imagine the same technique in my town with the stories of Aboriginal massacres and children taken away while at the local primary school, now a heritage museum that doesn’t mention this particular part of history. We all walk on pavements laid over blood and bone and sorrow.