"12 Years a Slave" director Steve McQueen's next feature film will be about black American icon Paul Robeson, as revealed in The Guardian today. McQueen, who won the Best Picture Oscar for "12 Years" earlier this year, said this is the dream movie he wanted to make after the brutal IRA striker drama "Hunger" (2008).
"But I didn’t have the power, I didn’t have the juice," he told a New York audience at the Hidden Heroes awards, honoring civil rights activists murdered by the KKK in the 1960s.
McQueen has wanted to tell the story of Robeson— singer, actor and activist whose father escaped slavery and who shepherded anti-imperialist movements that landed on the McCarthy blacklist—since he was a teenager. One of the director's previous artworks, a digitally projected ream of documents entitled "End Credits," tributed Robeson in 2012.
Recent Governors Awards honoree Harry Belafonte is apparently involved in the Robeson film project. No further details yet, but we do know McQueen his HBO drama "Codes of Conduct" starring Devon Terrell is currently in the works.
