The name McQueen rings a bell, as there is the fashion designer Alexander McQueen and the famous actor Steve McQueen, but we are not talking about neither, but the namesake director. He made a name for himself in recent years through his three feature films, but is active since the early nineties.
He was born in 1969 in London to Grenadian parents and grew up in Ealing.
At school he was good at sports, especially football, but had later on troubles at school. Reasons therefore are, as McQueen describes, him being dyslexic including a lazy eye on the one side, but also institutional racism on the other as he was placed in a class for manual labour, more plumbers and builders, stuff like that.
According to him what saved him, was the fact that he was good at drawing, so he got into arts and took his A-levels there. After a few college attempts, he got into Chelsea College of Arts due to his strong portfolio. After his graduation he continued and studied at Goldsmiths College, catching the end of the Young British Artists era with artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Here his interest for film began. Since 1997 he has a house in Amsterdam and lives there with his wife Bianca Stigter, a Dutch film critic, and their two kids, a girl and a boy.
As money was a scarce resource McQueen started his career by making short films, in which he often starred himself. Important here to mention is for example his first short film Bear from 1993, in which two men, one of them McQueen, are filmed in black and white while wrestling. Other short films are Five Easy Pieces (1995), Drummroll (1998) or Deadpan (1999) for which he was awarded the Turner Prize in the same year.
Through this initial limitation he also showed the films often as installations in gallery spaces using often multiple screens and therefore helped position film as an art form. He represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009. But his intention was always to also make feature films, so in 2008 he presented to critical acclaim his first feature Hunger about the 1981 hunger strike in an Irish prison surrounding inmate Bobby Sands.
His second film Shame, released in 2011, is about sex addiction and its accompanying captivity, but also loneliness and solitude in a big city. He is also the first black director to win an Oscar for his latest feature film 12 years a slave. The film is based on the autobiographic story of Solomon Northup, who was as a free black man, kidnapped and forced into slavery, but could only escape twelve years later.
Interesting to see that all his feature film starred the actor Michael Fassbender but also that he deals with similar subjects such as confinement or physicality, but tries to highlight it from different angles.
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