Steve McQueen
Artist and Filmmaker
"Everyone deserves not just to survive but to live."
Steve McQueen is one of Britain’s most important artists and filmmakers. He has distinguished himself on the strength of a small, spare but very discerning handful of work in a range of media. Sharply political - though rarely polemical - his intense vision is marked by a preoccupation with the human body and a fascination with early cinema.
He was born Steven Rodney McQueen on 9 October 1969 in London, where he grew up, studying at the Chelsea School of Art and Design, Goldsmiths College and, briefly, the Tisch School of the Arts in New York City.
McQueen's early short films were often silent, shot on 16mm in black and white and projected as art installations on exceptionally large screens. Bear (1993), presented at the Royal College of Art shortly after his graduation, brought him immediate attention. In it, two naked men, one of them McQueen, confront each other in a fiercely erotic and / or aggressive encounter.
Hunger (2008), McQueen's first feature, explored the slow physical deterioration and death of the Irish Republican Army prisoner Bobby Sands (a breakthrough role for Michael Fassbender) during his 1981 hunger strike in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland. It won the Camera d'Or for first-time directors at the Cannes Film Festival and many subsequent awards.
Questions of race are present in the background of most of McQueen's work, and in Twelve Years a Slave (2013) the director- addressed them directly. Set in the mid-19th century, it was based on the autobiography of Solomon Northup, a New Yorker kidnapped and enslaved before regaining his freedom, and stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, alongside Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch and Brad Pitt.
McQueen received an OBE in 2002 and a CBE in 2011.
His latest film project ‘Small Axe’ is a drama anthology which comprises five original films by Steve McQueen.
Set from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, the films each tell a different story involving London's West Indian community, whose lives have been shaped by their own force of will despite rampant racism and discrimination. The first of these, Mangrove, opened the 2020 BFI London Film Festival and will be broadcast on the BBC in November.
The copy in this summary is from BFI.
Images ©BFI London Film Festival and ©McQueen Limited
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