Steve McQueen

The British video artist Steve McQueen (not to be confused with the Hollywood actor of the same name) distinguished himself by working in a laudably diverse number of mediums; though he began with film-related projects, he quickly branched out to include such mediums as sculpture and still photography. He began his formal training by studying at the Chelsea School of Art and at Goldsmith College in London, where he began making student films. Early short-subject works were done almost exclusively in black-and-white, without sound; they included the short Bear (1993) (depicting a brief and unusual encounter between two naked men), the 1997 Deadpan (with a gentleman standing in the middle of a building as it repeatedly falls down around him), and Drumroll (1998), for which McQueen affixed cameras to a barrel and rolled the barrel through Manhattan streets. McQueen shot and released his debut mainstream feature in 2008; entitled Hunger and starring Brian Milligan and Liam McMahon, it dramatizes the last painful months of Bobby Sand, a famous IRA (Irish Republican Army) activist who protested his brutal treatment by guards in Belfast's Maze Prison by undergoing a debilitating hunger strike and ultimately starving himself to death.

~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide