Director Steve McQueen, whose 12 Years a Slave won the Best Picture Oscar in 2014, has joined production company Superprime for commercial representation in the U.S. Superprime will produce McQueen’s advertising work in collaboration with his London-based production company, Lammas Park.
“Steve is a visionary and a pioneer, both as an artist and a filmmaker,” said Rebecca Skinner, managing director/executive producer at Superprime. “His films resonate powerfully with audiences and we look forward to bringing his vision to advertising.”
After attending Goldsmiths in 1993, McQueen created a series of critically acclaimed video works and short films commissioned for galleries. In 1999, he was awarded the Turner Prize, the highest honor for a British visual artist.
His first feature, Hunger, premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, where he became the first British director to win the Caméra d’Or award. Shame, his second major theatrical release, arrived in 2011, followed by 12 Years a Slave in 2013. An unflinching portrayal of the Antebellum South, 12 Years a Slave garnered McQueen a BAFTA for Best Film, a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, and a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture-Drama. In 2014, 12 Years a Slave earned McQueen distinction as the first Black filmmaker to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Next month, BBC and Amazon will air Small Axe, McQueen’s anthology series of five personal stories set within London’s West Indian community between 1969 and 1982. After stories from Small Axe premiered at the New York and London Film Festivals, McQueen became the first director ever to have two films [Mangrove and Lovers Rock from the Small Axe anthology] in competition at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival. He has dedicated the films to George Floyd “and all the other Black people that have been murdered, seen or unseen, because of who they are, in the U.S., U.K. and elsewhere. ‘If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.’ Black Lives Matter.”
Time Magazine included McQueen in its annual Time 100 list of the Most Influential People in the World, and he has twice been listed in the Powerlist Top 10 of the most influential Black Britons. He has been granted the British Film Institute’s highest honor, the BFI Fellowship, and was knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours for his services to the arts. His advertising work includes projects for Burberry and Chanel and a nine-minute short film for Kanye West’s “All Day.”
“It’s about seeing, contemplating, serious consideration,” McQueen told The Guardian in 2020. “It’s about being seen, and heard and recognized, so as the years pass they can’t make you invisible. You want to ensure that what you do will have a lasting effect.”
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist and Writer, Dies At 95
Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children's books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer's wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple's two cats and his recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been ill for a couple of years, "but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny."
Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched among numerous forms of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, urban angst and other societal currents. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political relations that defined his readers' lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with "communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority."
Feiffer won the United States' most prominent awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking home a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and "Munro," an animated short film he wrote, won a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
"My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh," Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. "Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down."
Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx. From... Read More