Occupied City
(Digital)

Milan Records releases Occupied City (Original Motion Picture Score) featuring music written by cellist, producer and composer Oliver Coates for Oscar and BAFTA Award-winning director Steve Mcqueen’s latest documentary .

Milan Records releases Occupied City (Original Motion Picture Score) featuring music written by cellist, producer and composer Oliver Coates for Oscar and BAFTA Award-winning director Steve Mcqueen’s latest documentary .

Informed by Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945), the film provides a portrait of the german occupation of Amsterdam set against recent years of pandemic and protest.

It was a serendipitous collaboration between composer and director: McQueen was unfamiliar with Coates prior to the film but discovered his music playing in a department store, prompting him to bring Coates on board for Occupied City.

Coates began the composing process with only a brief introduction to the film’s thematics, instructed by McQueen to write more personal pieces rather than scoring direct to picture. Combining cello with moving, ambient synth work, the resulting 11-track collection is a sensitive sonic companion to the onscreen story, reflecting on past, present and future with an evocative meditation on devastation and resilience.

Speaking of working with director Steve McQueen, composer Oliver Coates says, “He [McQueen] told me to make music about me, my family, and some deeper metaphysical questions rather than focus on scoring his film.

I think he was looking for a vibrational match that could forge a synergy between music and picture without forcing or directing any emotions from me.
The music acts like interludes from the voiceover in the documentary, so it doesn’t feel like documentary music at all, but intimate interludes in a grand meditative portrait of Amsterdam and the resilience of its people.”

Director Steve Mcqueen adds, “He [Coates] is very instinctual and quite special, and what I love about his music is that it does have a way of bringing the past into the present.

There’s a search for the future in what he’s doing but you feel that it is steeped in history. His music has an anchoring quality but there’s also an impulse to explore and experiment.”

Occupied City was released theatrically in the USA on 25 December 2023 by A24 and is released in UK & Irish cinemas on 9 February 2024 by Modern Films.

About Occupied City

The past collides with our precarious present in Steve McQueen’s bravura documentary Occupied City, informed by the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945) written by Bianca Stigter.
McQueen creates two interlocking portraits: a door-to-door excavation of the Nazi occupation that still haunts his adopted city, and a vivid journey through the last years of pandemic and protest. What emerges is both devastating and life-affirming, an expansive meditation on memory, time, and where we’re headed.

About Oliver Coates

Oliver Coates is a cellist, electronic producer and composer based in Glasgow. He has composed the scores for films The Stranger and Aftersun among others, and for the new series Mary & George directed by Oliver Hermanus.
He has released three solo records on RVNG Intl, most recently skins n slime, and has collaborated with Arca, Mica Levi and Sega Bodega.

As a solo artist he has performed a headline set curated by David Lynch at Manchester International Festival, opened for Thom Yorke across Europe and the US, and opened for Radiohead at Emirates Old Trafford in Manchester.
The Fader called him “a music guru with Aphex Twin-level range and an ear for transferring the timeless into electronic music.”

About Steve Mcqueen

Academy Award winner and British Film Institute Fellow Steve McQueen is a British artist and filmmaker. His critically acclaimed first feature Hunger (2008), starring Michael Fassbender as an IRA hunger-striker, won the Camera D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
He re-teamed with Fassbender for his follow up feature Shame (2011) for which Fassbender won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival for Best Actor. McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave (2013) dominated awards season, winning the Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA and AAFCA Awards for Best Picture while McQueen received DGA, Academy, BAFTA and Golden Globe directing nods.
His fourth feature Widows (2018) was one of the best reviewed films of the year and starred Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Elizabeth Debicki and Michelle Rodriguez.

In 2020, McQueen’s anthology series Small Axe, comprising five original films about resilience and triumph in London’s West Indian community from the late 1960s through the early 80s, was awarded Best Picture by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, while McQueen received the Storyteller Award for series at the 16th Annual Final Draft Awards.

Small Axe was also the recipient of fifteen BAFTA Television nominations.
Three of the five films in the series played at the 58th New York Film Festival with Lovers Rock opening the fest, with two of the five selected for the 2020 Cannes Film Festival.

Past documentary works include the BAFTA-winning three-part series Uprising (2021) for the BBC about the tragedy and aftermath of the New Cross fire and subsequent deaths of 13 young black British people in 1981 that went on to define race relations in the UK for a generation. McQueen directed and produced Uprising.

He also served as a co-producer on Three Minutes – A Lengthening (2021), directed and co-written by Bianca Stigter.

The recipient of many accolades for his work as a visual artist, McQueen was awarded with the Turner Prize in 1999, and represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009. He has exhibited and held his artwork in major museums around the world. A retrospective was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Schaulager in Basel. In 2016, he received the Johannes Vermeer Award at the Hague.
Tate Modern and Tate Britain were home to two critically acclaimed shows in 2019/2020, Year 3 and a Retrospective Steve McQueen. In 2017, McQueen made an artwork in response to the fire that took place earlier that year on 14 June at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, West London. 72 people died in the tragedy.

McQueen showed Grenfell for the first time at The Serpentine Gallery in London in April through 10 May 2023.

In 2020, McQueen was awarded a knighthood in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List for his services to the Arts.

About Bianca Stitger

Bianca Stigter is an historian and cultural critic. She writes for Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and published three books of essays.
Stigter was an associate producer on Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave and Widows.
In 2019 she published the book Atlas van een bezette stad. Amsterdam 1940-1945 (Atlas of an Occupied City. Amsterdam 1940-1945).

In 2021 she directed the documentary Three Minutes – A Lengthening, which premiered in the Giornate degli Autori on the Venice Film Festival and was selected for the festivals of Telluride, Toronto, Sundance, as well as IDFA and DocAviv.

Three Minutes – A Lengthening won the 2022 Yad Vashem Award for cinematic excellence in a Holocaust related Documentary.

It played to great critical acclaim in cinemas in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and other countries.

Atlas van een bezette stad. Amsterdam 1940-1945 was published in the Netherlands by AtlasContact.


( - Milan Records - Sony Music Masterworks - )

More info at: Official Web Site A 24

Milan Records presents a soundtrack for the documentary Occupied City. The album contains the score composed by Oliver Coates.

Milan Records presents a soundtrack for the documentary Occupied City. The album contains the score composed by Oliver Coates.

The soundtrack is available to download on all digital music services since February 9, 2024.

Occupied City is directed by Steve McQueen

The past collides with our precarious present in Steve McQueen’s bravura documentary Occupied City, informed by the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945) written by Bianca Stigter. McQueen creates two interlocking portraits: a door-to-door excavation of the german occupation that still haunts his adopted city, and a vivid journey through the last years of pandemic and protest.
What emerges is both devastating and life-affirming, an expansive meditation on memory, time, and where we’re headed.

More info at: Official Web Site Festival de Cannes

More info at: Official Web Site A 24