Twelve Years A Slave

Another film by McQueen who doesn’t shy away from the difficult areas of life. He chooses actors who have the ability to translate his passion for the truth into gut wrenching characterisation. The captured slave, the brutal sadistic slave master, the traumatised young black woman broken by life. McQueen’s genius is to portray the endurance of the human spirit without sentiment or superficiality. The film ranks in terms of his courage to confront the politics of oppression with the portrayal of Bobby Sands’s death in ‘Hunger’; both are historically significant.