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Hunger
Arty examination of Maze Prison strikes in Northern Ireland
Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands and Liam Cunningham as Father Dominic Moran in Hunger by Steve McQueen (Photo: Blast! Films/Hunger Ltd.)
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Hunger is the first stab at feature filmmaking by young Turner Prize-winning British artist Steve McQueen, who has gained a reputation in the UK for his museum-situated experimental films. But unlike Julian Schnabel, another artist-turned-director who took on Jean-Michel Basquiat for his first feature, McQueen takes on the difficult subject of the 1981 Hunger Strike at Maze Prison in Northern Ireland led by Bobby Sands.
The strikes—where Sands and others starved themselves to death—were part of a series of protests by inmates associated with the IRA who wanted to be classified as political prisoners and who, because they refused to wear normal prison clothes, were often naked. McQueen seems to enjoy the challenge of creating beautiful images of horrible things, and his visual concentration on sores, excrement and Sands’ withering body can seem nearly pornographic. But McQueen has said that he wanted to show “what it was like to see, hear, smell and touch in the H-block in 1981.”
Through his skill as a visual artist, one who is also interested in the abstraction of what it means to die for a cause, McQueen successfully creates a controversial film that addresses the complications of heroism and martyrdom.