What 2013 biographical drama starring Chiwetel Ejiofor won Best Picture?

What 2013 biographical drama starring Chiwetel Ejiofor won Best Picture? The answer is 12 Years a Slave.

Directed by Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave is based on the 1853 memoir Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup. Northup was a free Black man living in New York who was kidnapped in 1841, sold into slavery, and held in Louisiana for 12 years before regaining his freedom. Chiwetel Ejiofor portrays Northup, whose struggle forms the film’s emotional and historical center.

The film received nine Academy Award nominations and won three at the 86th Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress for Lupita Nyong’o. Its Best Picture victory made McQueen the first Black director of a Best Picture winner and made him, Brad Pitt, and other producers the first Black recipients credited with producing such a winner.

A common mix-up is confusing it with Django Unchained, another acclaimed film about slavery, or Selma, a later historical drama about Martin Luther King Jr. Unlike those films, 12 Years a Slave adapts a firsthand nineteenth-century memoir and centers on Northup’s illegal enslavement and eventual rescue.