Occupied City: Director Steve McQueen on new documentary and growing up in London
Tap above to watch Lucrezia Millarini's interview with Steve McQueen
Sir Steve McQueen has never been one to shy away from the hard but important topics.
The West London-born director is the force behind award winning films like 12 Years a Slave and Hunger and his latest documentary tackles the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam and its lasting impact.
The documentary, Occupied City, has been screened at the London Film Festival and was a personal project for McQueen.
"Personal because I’d been living in Amsterdam for about 27 years and my wife is Dutch," McQueen told ITV News London. "It is one of those things as an artist or as a filmmaker often you’re going to a far flung country to make a project, but this one happened to be on my doorstep. "Things which I assumed were innocent had a certain sort of history," he explained.
In Occupied City the past collides with the present with a door-to-door excavation of the Nazi occupation that still haunts his adopted city, coupled with a journey through the last years of pandemic and protest.
McQueen was awarded a CBE for services to the visual arts and knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to film.
He also has a string of awards to his name, including an Academy Award two BAFTAs and the BFI Fellowship.
The director was born less than a mile from Grenfell and described Ladbroke Grove as one of his "stomping patches".
He made a 24-minute film with no narration or dramatisation, simply titled Grenfell, six months after the deadly fire.
McQueen added: "It’s just devastating, the fact that people who did not have to die died. People who did not have to be affected by this were affected.
"The powers that be have to be held to account. That’s just how it is - this did not have to happen."
Among his most recent works is the Small Axe series, a series of films telling stories about the lives of West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s.
"Everything I’ve done about the past is also about the present and I think with Small Axe again it’s reflecting on a time when, for me as a young person and living in that environment of the community," McQueen explained. "All I can say is how the community has been affected now with various situations with knife crime and so forth and how still with police harassment and so forth these things have still not been resolved," he added.
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