HUNGER World Cinema

Though ostensibly about the 1981 hunger strike initiated by Irish Republican Army leader Bobby Sands, this poetic-realist debut by Steve McQueen ventures into far deeper territory, seeking to visually articulate the very nature of oppression and resistance. Beginning with bloody knuckles rinsed in a basin, McQueen builds scene after vivid scene to provoke or enrage or enlighten us, and, ultimately, to break our hearts. Prisoners find creative means of dispersing feces with nowhere to go; a police officer weeps over the smashing of flesh; an execution is carried out against the most mundane backdrop imaginable. We don’t see Sands until we ll into the film when, in a coup de cinema, he describes his motivations in one extraordinary continuous shot. Finally, we watch, stricken, as Sands, in silence, approaches his final transcendent state, flesh wasted but spirit very obviously intact. McQueen’s feature, the deserving winner of the Discovery Award at Toronto and the opening night film at Un Certain Regard, takes us into places where only cinema might the dark recesses of the human psyche, the bone-crushing force of oppression and the redemptive possibilities of self-sacrifice. As a visual artist, McQueen has reached legendary status in his native England he won the country’s most prestigious award, the Turner Prize, in 1999). Here, he transmutes a political story into something more resonant and permanent : “extreme cinema,” as Peter Bradshaw described it, “for an extreme subject.”