Steve McQueen Wins Volta Lifetime Achievement Award

Turner Prize–winning British visual artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen was presented with the Volta Lifetime Achievement Award at the Dublin International Film Festival earlier today. Considered one of Ireland’s most prestigious filmawards, the prize is named after the country’s first movie theater, in Dublin.

Widely viewed as one of the most important filmmakers of his generation, McQueen is known for intense, dramatic works about challenging topics. “Steve McQueen’s work makes one aware of movement—migratory, political, forced—that has been compelled and then interdicted,” wrote Christina Sharpe in a 2020 issue ofArtforum. Among his feature films areHunger(2008), about the 1981 Irish hunger strike, andShame(2011), about an executive’s battle with sex addiction. His searing historical drama12 Years a Slavein 2014 became the first film by a Black director to win best picture at the Academy Awards. His recentSmall Axeseries (2020), set within London’s West Indian community of the late 1960s to 1980s, reckons with issues of class and racism, and his 2023 documentaryOccupied City, which clocks in at nearly five hours, explores Amsterdam under Nazi control.

McQueen’s works outside the feature film arena include his first short, Bear, 1993, in which two naked men wrestle; Queen and Country, 2007, 160 sheets of stamps, each presenting the portrait of a British soldier killed in the Iraq War; Running Thunder, 2007, an eleven-minute film of a horse lying dead in a meadow; and End Credits, 2012–, an ongoing durational work centering on the persecution of Paul Robeson, which features two voices reading from redacted FBI files on the activist. McQueen was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2002 and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2011. He was knighted in 2020.