Saturday March 21              HUNGER
Ireland / UK 2008                 96  minutes                15 certificate
Directed by Steve McQueen         

Starring Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham

Former Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen’s film making debut was justifiable winner of the Carl Foreman award at this year’s Baftas, an award given for special achievement by a first time British film maker. It centres on the 1981 hunger strike of Bobby Sands in an attempt to secure political prisoner status for IRA prisoners. But although the film focuses on Sands, and his moral justification for his cause, the coverage of the six weeks prior to Sands’ death allows for a wider, unflinching portrait of the appalling brutality of the Maze prison, since likened to Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. At its premiere at Cannes Hunger provoked some walk outs but also a standing ovation. McQueen’s film is powerful, beautiful and harrowing, an exploration of the human body and what ordinary individuals will do to themselves, or have done to them, in extraordinary situations. It shows how dysfunctional and despairing the whole remorseless process was: how the Irish republican movement, angry and frustrated, chose to put self-harm at the centre of its mythology. It is a portrait of an agonised period of British and Irish history that, given the events of March 7th this year, is not as far behind us as we think.

Back to Index