HUNGER - Irish Film Week

HUNGER takes us inside Maze Prison in Northern Ireland during the 1981 hunger strike, focusing on the final weeks of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands. Michael Fassbender plays Sands, but McQueen doesn’t approach the story as a conventional political biopic. The film begins with prison routine, physical confinement and the escalating confrontation between republican prisoners and the British state, gradually narrowing its focus until Sands becomes the centre.

Director Sir Steve McQueen (not the American Steve McQueen who starred in BULLITT) utilises long stretches with very little dialogue. Cells, corridors, bodies and institutional routines carry as much weight as speeches. Then, near the middle of the film, McQueen does the opposite and gives us an extended conversation between Sands and a priest, played by Liam Cunningham, about the morality and purpose of the hunger strike. The scene runs for more than fifteen minutes in a largely static take and forces the political argument into the open without turning either man into a mouthpiece.

I’ve included HUNGER because any serious week of modern Irish cinema needs to acknowledge the Troubles, but I didn’t want to program a conventional historical drama. HUNGER is more formally ambitious than that. It asks the audience to sit inside the physical and moral consequences of political conflict rather than watching them from a comfortable distance. It also gives us an early Michael Fassbender performance before he became an international star.

HUNGER was McQueen’s first feature film. Five years later he directed 12 YEARS A SLAVE - which won the Academy Award for Best Picture - cementing his place in history as the first Black director of a Best Picture winner. HUNGER itself premiered at Cannes in 2008, where McQueen won the Caméra d’Or for best first feature. It quickly established both McQueen and Fassbender as major filmmaking talents and remains one of the defining British and Irish films of the late 2000s.