Hunger

Turner prize-winning artist Steve McQueen's first feature film is a work of outstanding boldness and beauty. Set in Belfast's Maze Prison, it is an interpretation of the highly emotive events surrounding the 1981 IRA Hunger Strike, led by Bobby Sands. Hunger plunges us into world of the infamous H-blocks, where republican prisoners are on the Blanket and No-Wash protest, a hellish place for prisoners and guards alike. For the prisoners, their bodies are their only weapons, and after a new round of humiliation and violence, Sands decides to start a Hunger Strike to continue the fight for political prisoner status for republican internees.

Visceral and deeply disturbing, this is a compelling study of people in extreme circumstances resorting to extreme measures, made all the more forceful by McQueen's approach. Rigorous and spare, there's a near abstract quality to the construction of life inside the prison, almost eerily silent except for a bravuro extended dialogue between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and his priest (Liam Cunningham) about the morality and efficacy of Sands' decision. Both actors are superb, as indeed Fassbender is throughout, the later scenes unwaveringly capturing his wasted body as it approaches death. There's an anger running through Hunger, but compassion too, and McQueen and co-writer Enda Walsh are to be applauded for reminding us in brilliant, uncompromising fashion of the lived experiences of a period of our recent history that is often shamefully forgotten.
Sandra Hebron

This film is nominated for The Sutherland Trophy