Hunger

Artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen made his cinema debut with this provocative portrait of Irish republican prisoners defying the British government.

Northern Ireland, 1981. In the Maze prison, provisional IRA member Bobby Sands leads a group of Republican inmates seeking to reclaim their status as political prisoners, their so-called ‘dirty protest’ intensifying into hunger strikes. Steve McQueen's first feature film is an incendiary work with a lasting emotional impact, establishing key themes that he would return to throughout his career.

In the lead role, Michael Fassbender commands the picture, his slow disintegration evoking the director's statement that "It's the whole idea of the body as a weapon." Unafraid to adopt an unconventional dramatic structure – notably Sands’s lengthy soul-searching conversation with a concerned priest – McQueen’s film moves from shocking realist authenticity to inward contemplation as it surveys human loss in the face of unshakeable ideological conviction. With long takes and icy detachment, this is storytelling at its most wretchedly effective.