Steve McQueen: An American Cinematheque Retrospective

ABOUT THE SERIES:

The American Cinematheque is thrilled to welcome Academy Award-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen in-person for a retrospective around the release of his newest feature, BLITZ, an epic, perilous journey through the English countryside during World War II. McQueen’s body of work interrogates the past by studying humanity’s greatest moral failures to make sense of the present and the issues we still face today.

One of the great directorial feature debuts, HUNGER marked McQueen’s arrival as a singular creative visionary. A sobering, visceral account of Bobby Sands’ leadership of a hunger strike in prison during The Troubles in 1981, HUNGER is an unflinching portrait of the revolutionary spirit. In 2013, McQueen won the Academy Award for Best Picture for his pre-Civil War era epic, 12 YEARS A SLAVE, aiming his critical lens at the United States’ history of slavery in a story highlighting one of humanity’s darkest periods, as well as the rare kindnesses that shine through. McQueen has likewise explored the past through documentary filmmaking, such as his excavation of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam in OCCUPIED CITY, where past collides with present in a journey from World War II to recent years of pandemic and protest.

Applying his methods to television, McQueen released the 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, highlighted by LOVERS ROCK, a hypnotic, humanizing story of a single evening that follows many members of the same community, who end up at the same house party as they attempt to connect and reconcile amid the music and violence surrounding them.