HUNGER

This award-winning explicit and powerful movie is shocking on every level.  It covers a moment in recent British/Irish history that those of us who can remember, want desperately to forget.  This is the struggles in Northern Ireland in the 1980’s when a group of IRA prisoners are incarcerated in the notorious Maze Prison for a variety of violent crimes and cold-blooded assassinations.  They wage a series of protests against the British authorities, which in the end turns into a Hunger Strike with their infamous leader Bobby Sands eventually becoming the first of nine martyrs that starved themselves to deaths. 

The harrowing violence is very graphic and stomach-turning in parts but there are some quiet sections in the movie such as a 20-minute conversation that Sands has debating with a moderate Catholic Priest trying to convince him of the morality of his actions.  This is filmed almost entirely with a single camera shot with the men facing each other bathed in cigarette smoke, which gives it such a dynamic resonance.

In fact no matter how unpalatable the subject matter unquestionable is, especially as it portrays the IRA militants and their cause sympathetically, it is a devastatingly stunning movie thanks to the director Steve McQueen.  He’s a Turner Award visual arts Winner and in this his debut film he’s disregarded all the conventional structures of a plotting a story, which not only succeeds at every level but also makes for an excellent and outstanding piece of movie making.

R.T.V. As a fervent cinefile I cannot recommend this movie highly enough, but as a political partisan with my Ulster Family, I must confess that I still found the subject matter horrifyingly distasteful.

(Reprinted from www.rogerwalkerdack.com published in 2009)

★★★★★★★★★★