Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen reached cinema from the visual arts. Born in London in 1969, he won the Turner Prize in 1999, the work behind it a twenty-two-minute three-channel video installation shot with a camera of his own design. His first feature, Hunger, came back from Cannes in 2008 with the Camera d'Or. He made the second, Shame, with Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, and it took two best film awards at Venice in 2011. The third, 12 Years a Slave, was adapted from Solomon Northup's memoir: Northup, a carpenter and a fiddler, is talked into joining two travelling musicians on tour, then beaten and carried in chains to a plantation. Three Oscars went to the film, one of them best picture, and the same film brought him the directing award at Independent Spirit's 2014 ceremony.