Introduction Steve McQueen If you search the internet quite simply for 'Black British Director' Steve McQueen's Wikipedia page is the top result. To the newer class of film enthusiasts and critics, Sir Steve Rodney McQueen CBE is a British film director most notably known for his Oscar-winning film about a free African American man being sold into slavery, 12 Years A Slave (2013). Recently, he exploded onto the small screen with a series of immersive, biographical, and explorative films that made up the Small Axe Anthology (2020). These five movies which varied in length and tone were connected in their unstripped truth of the West Indian experience of living in the UK between the late 1960s and early 1980s. McQueen's decades long career through the arts, makes it impossible to put him into a box. A man who is led by his own creative muse, the unpredictability of his next subject and medium continues to show the depth and skill that makes him a household name across generations. Through his documentaries and films McQueen has been able to bring history to the forefront. He's highlighted the political through Northern Irish prisoners taking on the Conservative Government in 1981 and the injustice towards nine activists wrongly accused of inciting a riot in Notting Hill, West London.

McQueen has exposed the existing power and resilience of women and how it manifests tenfold in grief, and he has expressed his everyday experience as a Black man walking along on a cloudless day. All the while McQueen keeps a synergy in the recurring themes of endurance, truth, brutality and beauty giving a simplistic style to the complexity of every subject. McQueen has described himself as 'not very friendly', an honest analysis which sits self-deprecatingly alongside the high praise which both the man and the creative artist has received from those who have worked with him. Viola Davis, who worked with McQueen on the movie Widows, commented on how his directorial style meant that all parts of you were seen. As a Black woman, as a Black actress, she is rarely supported or looked at beyond face value: a dark-skinned woman with a deep voice and the aurora of authority. However, McQueen's observation of all parts of her gave off a sense of adoration. He saw her femininity, her shyness, and her fragility. In 2020, when McQueen received his knighthood for services to film, it was an honour that was long overdue and cemented his place as an influential changemaker who was.