Hunger

1981.

The H block in Belfast's Maze Prison.

This film captures the development and escalation of protest by the 'political' prisoners held here as things moved through 'The 'Blanket protest' onto 'The Dirty Protest" and finally to 'The Hunger Strikes' that claimed Bobby Sands and eight of his compatriot's lives.

As the end credits of the film show, the enemy, in the form of Margaret Thatcher was 'not for turning' and did not grant political status to these men that she considered no more than murderers. They did, however, lead to many concessions - bit by bit.

This astounding movie falls into three very clear sections; the gut wrenching blanket and dirty protest; a long and deeply personal conversation (in one 20 minute take) between Sands and his priest where Sands is asked to justify and then walk away from the impending hunger strike; and finally Sands' ordeal itself.

Each section has a different pace and personality. Each is desperate in its own way.

This film pulls few punches. The stench of human excrement is almost palpable in the opening act and the way in which Michael Fassbender brings Sands' death to the screen is almost unbearable.

But the real triumph of the film is that it takes no political sides and makes no judgements but does not sit on the fence. How? Because it invokes the viewer to do that themselves. Sands is neither a figure to pity or to vilify. It really is quite remarkable that the artist Steve McQueen can achieve this so consistently.

And this is art with a capital A. Every scene is stunningly rendered. The pace, at times snail-like, allows you consider in real detail the situation these men found themselves in (or created however you want to look at it).

Fassbender's performance is miraculous.

McQueen though, is the star of the show. One scene in particular when the men slop out by pouring their night's urine under the doors of the corridor simultaneously is quite beautiful, as is the Hirst-like art that some of them create from their excrement (that's what makes up the poster image).

Film of the year. No contest.

Incidentally we saw it in the DCA's Cinema 2. What a cracking screen.

(As we scoffed coffee and fudge doughnuts. How's that for irony?)

Steve McQueen, a noted young British artist, has made a powerful first film about the Irish prisoners in H-Block of Maze Prison, Northern Ireland, and the hunger strike and death of Bobby Sands in 1981. The images are searing, both horrible and beautiful (McQueen is aware from Goya that images of war can be both), and much of the film is non-verbal, but the action is broken up by a centerpiece tour-de-force debate between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham) that is as intensely verbal as the rest is wordless. In Irish playwright Enda Walsh's rapid-fire dialogue quips are exchanged, then passionate declarations, in a duel that's like a killer tennis match: watching, we listen, and the camera, hitherto ceaselessly in motion, becomes still. Hunger, with its rich language, intense images, and devastating story, is surely one of the best English-language of the year, and it understandably won the Camera d'Or at Cannes for the best first film. Like the American Julian Schnabel, Steve McQueen is another visual artist who has turned out to be an astonishingly good filmmaker.

Faithful to the physical details of the H-blocks and the treatment of the prisoners, the film is still honed down to essentials and includes a series of sequences so intense it may take viewers a long time to digest them. As the film opens, an officer of the prison, Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), follows his normal routine. His knuckles are bloody and painful; later we learn why. His wife brings him sausage, rasher, and eggs.

Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan) a young Irish republican prisoner, tall, gaunt, and Christ-like, is brought into the prison. He refuses to wear the prison uniform, so, joining the Blanket protest, he's put in with fellow "non-conforming" prisoner Gerry Campbell (Liam McMahon) in a cell whose walls are smeared with feces. Those of us who were around when these events happened (Steve McQueen was 12, and remembers the coverage), remember them so well we could have seen these walls. Campbell shows Gillen hot to receive "comms" (communications) from visitors and pass them to their leader Bobby Sands at Sunday mass.

When prisoners agree to wear civilian garments, they're mocked by the "clown clothes" they're handed out and riot, screaming and yelling and tearing up everything in their cells. They also periodically collect their urine and pour it under their cell doors out into the prison hallway where the guards must walk. The result is a brutal punishment by the prison in which the prisoners are taken out to the hallway and beaten naked by a gauntlet of police in riot gear. An eventual repercussion is that Raymond Lohan is shot dead while visiting his catatonic mother in a home.

A poetic flourish of the meeting between Sands and Father Moran is Sands's story of going to the country as a Belfast boy on the cross country team and going down to a woods and a stream where he is the only one who dares to put a dying foal out of its misery by drowning it. The images this tale evoke become the objective correlative of Bobby's last thoughts when he is dying in the prison hospital.

The central issue was being treated as political prisoners. From 1972, paramilitary prisoners had held some of the rights of prisoners of war. This ended in March 1976 and the republican prisoners were sent to the new Maze Prison and its "H-blocks" near Belfast. Special Category Status for prisoners convicted of terrorist crimes was abolished by the English government. Hunger doesn't focus on ideology or public policy, other than to have the voice of Margaret Thatcher, in several orotund declarations, adamantly denying the validity of the republicans' cause or status. The Sands-Moran debate is more about feelings and tactics.

Another powerful contrast comes when Sand goes on the hunger strike and is taken to the clean, quiet setting of the hospital where he is lovingly cared for and visited by a good friend and his parents, who're even allowed to sleep there during his last days. Sands' condition is dramatic, heightened by horrible sores, and a report to his parents of the rapid damage to internal organs and heart that his fast will cause.

It was McQueen's decision to eschew a screenwriter in favor of a playwright for the script, and his choice of his near-contemporary Enda Walsh, an Irishman resident in London, was a wise one. McQueen determined the structure and inspired the paring down. Walsh makes the central verbal scene sing. Its intensity is such that it has no trouble at all competing with the harsh prison scenes. It is brilliant stroke. Great theater you could say, but the film's contribution is to make the whole train of events alive and human at a time when they are acutely relevant to the post 9/11 world of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

Shown at Cannes, Telluride, and Toronto, included in the New York Film Festival 2008.

This debut from former artist turned director Steve McQueen will leave you breathless. In its own understated way it is epic, bold, brutal and beautiful. Telling the story of the last six weeks in the life of Bobby Sands the Irish republican hunger striker the film pulls no punches in showing life inside the maze prison and what the prisoners did to try and win political status. From the outset the shots are amazing with McQueen utilising his artistic eye to bring the best out of the very cold prison environment, his attention to detail is simply stunning making every single frame fantastically watchable despite the sometimes gruesome subject matter. Also his approach of less is more adds to the atmosphere as he has shots that have no sounds or music, like the guard cleaning the corridor with its fixed camera unflinching for several minutes the only sound the eerie echoing scrubbing. Unofficially split into three the first part deals with the incarceration and subsequent no wash protests while the last deals with the hunger strikes but it's the central piece that separates which most will remember for its ability to captivate despite just being a conversation between Sands and a visiting priest. Again shot from a fixed angle and superbly lit Sands (Fassbender) explains the morality behind his decision to stop eating. The acting and the monologue will stay with you long after the films finished and cements actor Fassbender firmly in the role to the point where you start to feel for him as he begins to waste away. When the film premiered at Cannes it caused walkouts and standing ovations before walking away with the Camera d'Or for best debut and rightly so, not only is it one of the best films of the year it is one of the most powerful I've seen. Regardless of where you stand politically the message is universal and just like the circle of faeces smeared on Sands cell wall, McQueen has crafted something beautiful out of something horrible.

Hunger is a powerful and disturbing feature-film debut for the visual artist Steve McQueen. The film takes place almost exclusively within the confines of a high-security prison in Northern Ireland, where many members of the Irish Republican Army are interned. The small confines of the prison serve as a microcosm of the wider Troubles in Ireland. The conflict between the British wardens and the Irish inmates escalates steadily, with each indignity and abuse inevitably leading to another.

The conditions revealed in the prison are deeply disturbing, with the inmates fouling the jail with effluent and the guards responding with ritual humiliation and savage beatings. McQueen's camera is an unflinching witness to the squalor and cruelty, and with the vivid imagery and forceful sounds it is almost possible to smell and feel the frightening environs of the film.

Although the focus of the film ultimately falls on Bobby Sands, the IRA member and inmate who leads a fatal hunger strike within the prison, we are not introduced to the main protagonist until a third of the way through the film. This approach works remarkably well in setting the scene for the main narrative, but it is disappointing that the different perspectives on each side are somewhat sidelined thereafter, as Sands's personal struggle takes centre stage.

The terrible squalor of the prison cells provides some of the film's most powerful images, but it is the second third of the film that is the most gripping, as Sands converses and argues with a visiting Catholic priest. An unmoving camera is trained upon these two protagonists for what must be nearly half an hour, as Sands reveals his plan for a new hunger strike and defends his methods of achieving political goals, ultimately berating what he sees as the priest's despondency and inertia. This is an utterly compelling piece of cinema.

However, at the end of this gripping conversation, the director sees fit to insert a somewhat tortured analogy as Sands recalls for the priest a defining moment of his boyhood. This is an unnecessary effort to inject conventional beauty into Sands's story, and sits awkwardly with the general tone of the film.

In the final third of the film, the hunger strike is depicted in by now characteristically brutal detail. Lead man Michael Fassbender clearly underwent a very painful regime to portray the wasting and withering of Bobby Sands in his last days. Unfortunately, amidst the impressive attention to detail, McQueen goes further in romanticising his main protagonist through a series of flashbacks to Sands's childhood. This again jars with the realistic feel of the rest of the film, and points to McQueen's obsession with Sands, which he has admitted to having had since a young age.

Although at times steering a little close to hagiography, McQueen's directorial debut is still a bold and engrossing film that cultivates an understanding for the very different people caught in up in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It will be fascinating to see what his next project will be.

Hunger is a low budget film from a production company more recognisable for its TV work, without any recognisable stars, without a really big distributer to get it around and directed by a Turner Prize winning visual artist making his film debut. Already you would perhaps be considering giving it a miss and maybe this isn't the best time to mention it is a largely dialogue free account of hunger-striker Bobby Sands set entirely in Northern Ireland's infamous Maze prison. This is probably one of the reasons that the film hasn't been as widely seen as it deserves to be or why audiences haven't flocked into screenings of it on a Saturday night. Certainly it is not an easy watch given the subject matter alone but yet it is a compelling and quite brilliant film.

Although the nature of the story leads the viewer to be emotionally invested in one "side" of the situation, McQueen never does anything that opens his film to this suggestion of bias or of scoring political points, if anything his attention to the detail of the tightly focused story does just the opposite. As well as telling us how many hunger strikers died, he point out how many prison guards were murdered during the period and, in my favourite part, introduces us to the prison via one guard soothing his hands (which tells us the frequency of what he does). It is a nice moment but not as telling as the thrill the viewer gets as he checks for bombs and starts his car – we are supposed to be on the edge of our seat and we are, swiftly followed by the realisation that this is an experience we would repeat if we were in his driveway the next day or the next.

From here we move into a nearly dialogue free thirty minute opening where no central character really comes forward and our "focus" is on life in the prison for guards and prisoners – a story that almost starts without there being a "story". The film later brings Bobby Sands to the fore, delivering one impressive dialogue scene before returning to a dialogue-light charting of his hunger strike on the way to the conclusion that we all know is coming. Yet it manages to be really engaging because of the level of each detail in each scene and the relevance of each scene to the overall film. The scene that has gotten all the mentions and praise is the long dialogue scene between Sands and the priest who comes to see him before his strike. Filmed in three distinct shots, the scene is technically impressive but also allows the main dialogue delivery of the film – and the only really moment where anyone is allowed to debate and discuss the actions. Even here McQueen does not allow sides to be taken but keeps it as two men talking. It is engaging, really well written and of course, really well acted.

It is ironic that in this scene the film sits still for ages and allows the frame to remain the same because for the majority of the film McQueen's camera is the star. So many shots are striking that it almost becomes "normal" to be transfixed by an image on the screen. Whether it be a excrement-smeared cell, urine flowing down a hall or a man washing blood from his hands, it looks great and the care taken to construct each image fills the "gap" that the dialogue leaves. The performances are mostly very good and compliment the "few words" approach by bringing a lot when required and wearing their characters convincingly. There are some you may recognise but I didn't. Fassbender is the most memorable as he has the biggest character and the most startling journey, but this should not take away from smaller turns from Graham, Mullen and a few others who are also good. The film is not perfect though. The uninitiated may struggle to understand the bigger picture as you don't get a lot of help with that and those that don't get into the telling initially may be left cold by the approach. However these "weaknesses" are not missed targets or failings but rather the "cons" that have to come with the overwhelming pros of the manner of delivery.

Hunger is not an easy film to watch but it is a great film. It is wonderfully shot with an artist's composure but McQueen is not a "visual style" director who doesn't come with anything else (list your own failed music video director turned film director here) but rather he uses this approach to improve the film and make the telling better. The acting is impressive because of how real they feel and how little dialogue they have across the whole film, but to me the real star was McQueen. He is a visual artist and it shows as he makes the majority of his shots striking and engaging, even if they are not "beautiful". It may get a bit more exposure due to awards chatter but even if it doesn't it is certainly worth checking out.