Hunger

The 1981 Irish hunger strike was the culmination of a five-year protest during the troubles by Irish republican prisoners in Northern Ireland. The protest began as the blanket protest in 1976, when the British government withdrew Special Category Status for convicted paramilitary prisoners. In 1978, after a number of attacks on prisoners leaving their cells to “slop out”, the dispute escalated into the dirty protest, where prisoners refused to wash and covered the walls of their cells with excrement. In 1980 seven prisoners participated in the first hunger strike, which ended after 53 days.

The second hunger strike took place in 1981 and was a showdown between the prisoners and the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. One hunger striker, Bobby Sands, was elected as a Member of Parliament during the strike, prompting media interest from around the world. The strike was called off after ten prisoners had starved themselves to death-including Sands, whose funeral was attended by 100,000 people. The strike radicalised nationalist politics, and was the driving force that enabled Sinn Féin to become a mainstream political party.  

Hunger is a powerfully bleak interpretation of life in Maze prison and of the events surrounding Bobby Sands fatal hunger strike.
 

The director, Steve McQueen, expertly uses the camera as opposed to dialogue to paint a massively depressing picture of life in Maze prison.  He immediately immerses us in the filthy world of prison life through the eyes of a new prisoner who joins the Blanket protest and quickly learns about the dirty protest, smuggling and exchanging communications with the outside world and passing them onto the block leader Bobby Sands.  The film is a visual and aural assault on the sense as McQueen certainly pulls no punches when it comes to depicting the filth the prisoners live in, you can practically smell the excrement on the wall and your stomach will churn at the site of the maggots in the cell.

Sands is played by Michael Fassbender who went on a extreme diet to ensure that you’re shocked as he wastes away in front of your eyes and it certainly does provoke concern for the actors health (he’s fine now, I saw him at the BAFTAs).

Hunger is a unflinching, brutal and often unnerving film to watch but I found it as compelling as it is unnerving.

DVD Extras

-Making of feature

 

~review by Lee