The Turner Prize-winning artist and film director Steve McQueen, whose last film 12 Years A Slave won a best picture Oscar, has revealed that his next movie will be about the black American actor, singer and left-wing political activist Paul Robeson.
Speaking on stage in New York at the Hidden Heroes awards organised by the Andrew Goodman Foundation, McQueen said: “His [Robeson’s] life and legacy was the film I wanted to make the second after Hunger [McQueen’s debut film, about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands]. But I didn’t have the power, I didn’t have the juice.”
Robeson (1898-1976), was the son of a slave and, after studying to become a lawyer, went on to become a internationally renowned film and singing star. A member of the Communist Party, he sang for anti-fascist fighters in the Spanish Civil War and was heavily involved in the civil rights movement in America. He was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, banned from film studios and music venues and unable to travel abroad.
McQueen explained at the event that he first came across Robeson as a teenager, when he was shown a newspaper cutting about the singer performing for miners in Wales (Robeson visited South Wales many times between 1929 and 1939).
The new film won’t be the first time that McQueen has made work about Robeson. In the 2012 piece, End Credits, a sequence of thousands of FBI files relating to Robeson are presented and read out by male and female voices in a looped film that lasts nearly six hours.
