Age: 56
male
Sir Steve Rodney McQueen CBE (born 9 October 1969) is an English film director, film producer, screenwriter, and video artist. Known for directing films that deal with intense subject matter, he has received several awards, including an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards, and a Golden Globe Award. He was honoured with the BFI Fellowship in 2016 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2020 for services to art and film. In 2014, he was included in Time magazine's annual Time 100 list of the "most influential people in the world". McQueen began his formal training studying painting at London's Chelsea College of Art and Design. He later pursued film at Goldsmiths College and briefly at New York University. Influenced by Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, and Andy Warhol, McQueen started making short films. In 1999, McQueen was awarded the Turner Prize for the "range" and "emotional intensity" of his art. He made his feature-length directorial debut with the historical drama Hunger (2008), which focused on the 1981 Irish hunger strike, followed by the erotic, psychosexual drama Shame (2011), which explored sex addiction. He won the Academy Award for Best Picture, directing the historical drama 12 Years a Slave (2013). He also directed the contemporary crime thriller Widows (2018) and the World War II drama Blitz (2024). For television, he released Small Axe (2020), a collection of five anthology films "set within London's West Indian community from the late 1960s to the early '80s". He also directed the BBC documentary series Uprising (2021) and the documentary film Occupied City (2023). Description above from the Wikipedia article Steve McQueen (director), licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Sixteen-year-old Deka lives in fear and anticipation of the blood ceremony that will determine whether she will become a member of her village. Already different from everyone else because of her unnatural intuition, Deka prays for red blood so she can finally feel like she belongs. But on the day of the ceremony, her blood runs gold, the color of impurity--and Deka knows she will face a consequence worse than death. Then a mysterious woman comes to her with a choice: stay in the village and submit to her fate, or leave to fight for the emperor in an army of girls just like her. They are called alaki--near-immortals with rare gifts. And they are the only ones who can stop the empire's greatest threat. Knowing the dangers that lie ahead yet yearning for acceptance, Deka decides to leave the only life she's ever known. But as she journeys to the capital to train for the biggest battle of her life, she will discover that the great walled city holds many surprises. Nothing and no one are quite what they seem to be--not even Deka herself.
