Movies: Steve McQueen

In the pre-Civil War United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery. Facing cruelty as well as unexpected kindnesses Solomon struggles not only to stay alive, but to retain his dignity. In th...

In World War II London, nine-year-old George is evacuated to the countryside by his mother, Rita, to escape the bombings. Defiant and determined to return to his family, George embarks on an epic, perilous journey back home as Rita searches for him....

The story of Bobby Sands, the IRA member who led the 1981 hunger strike during The Troubles in which Irish Republican prisoners tried to win political status....

A police shootout leaves four thieves dead during an explosive armed robbery attempt in Chicago. Their widows have nothing in common except a debt left behind by their spouses' criminal activities. Hoping to forge a future on their own terms, they jo...

Brandon, a thirty-something man living in New York, eludes intimacy with women but feeds his deepest desires with a compulsive addiction to sex. When his younger sister temporarily moves into his apartment, stirring up bitter memories of their shared...

An in-depth look of the 40 year journey, from post-war Germany to Hollywood royalty, of Hans Zimmer, the man who’s become the dominant force in the world of movie soundtracks. His film credits include The Lion King, Rain Man, Pirates of The Caribbean...

The past collides with the present in this excavation of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam: a journey from World War II to recent years of pandemic and protest and a provocative, life-affirming reflection on memory, time and what's to come....

Deadpan is a four-minute installation film in which McQueen re-stages a death-defying Buster Keaton stunt. The side of a house is filmed toppling again and again from all angles onto an unflinching McQueen, who survives thanks to a carefully position...

The film documents two men carrying palm trees through the streets of East London. McQueen tracked the men through a bustling Brick Lane market....

The story of the only three minutes of footage —a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938— showing images of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk (Poland) before the beginning of the Shoah....

For her extraordinary film essay, Living the Light, Director and Director of Photography Claire Pijman had access to the thousands of Hi8 video diaries, pictures and Polaroids that Müller photographed while he was at work on one of the more than 70 f...

Gravesend uses a documentary approach to focus on the mining of coltan, employed in the manufacture of cell phones, laptops and other high-tech apparatus. The film cuts between two sites: a technological, highly automated industrial plant in the West...

Caribs’ Leap / Western Deep comprises two complementary films that are shown together as a three-screen, synchronised colour video projection. The films were originally commissioned for the Documenta 11 exhibition in Kassel, Germany in 2002. They wer...

Director Steve McQueen films Trip-Hop artist Tricky recording 'Girls' In the tight confines of a recording booth, the musician Adrian Thomas, also known as Tricky, repeatedly performs the song 'girls' from his album Blowback (2001). The intimate and...

An exploration of the sensory experience of the TauTona gold mine in South Africa, showing migrant labourers working in dark, claustrophobic environments and the ear-splitting noise of drilling. The TauTona mine in South Africa, known as 'Western De...

Bear (10 minutes, 35 seconds) was Steve McQueen's first major film. Although not an overtly political work, for many viewers it raises sensitive issues about race, homoeroticism and violence. It depicts two naked men – one of whom is the artist – tus...

When Oxford Professor Patricia Kingori travels to Kenya, she uncovers the murky, multi-billion global underworld of essay-writing. Thousands of young and highly educated Kenyans – overqualified and chronically underemployed – have found lucrative wor...

Outlines the themes and artistic strategies that have guided McQueen’s work since he emerged in the mid-1990s. Marked by spatial, temporal, and narrative disjointedness and ambiguity, the work’s movements cohere into an orchestrated meditation on fil...

A close-up fixes on the eye of British actor Charlotte Rampling. McQueen's finger moves around her eye, pulling the skin and momentarily touching her eyeball. Rampling's eye continually adjusts to the movement of the finger, just as the camera lens g...

Cold Breath depicts the artist stroking, pulling and squeezing his nipple. Through a gesture that appears tender one moment and violent the next, the film is an intimate exploration of flesh as material....