Hunger

On 1 March 1981, IRA member Bobby Sands went on hunger strike in a prison in Northern Ireland. He died 66 days later. As well as being a portrait of Sands himself (a role thoroughly inhabited by Michael Fassbender), Hunger explores in detail how the body can become the battleground in a conflict such as the Troubles.

This multi-award-winning work by director and fine artist Steve McQueen depicts the physical ordeals prisoners face, the beatings, and the humiliations. The prison guard’s rinsing of his bloodied knuckles in the basin is an almost ritualistic act. The body is also at the center of the prisoners’ protests, with the ongoing denouement being the harrowing transformation of Sands’ own body.

Caught in the vice of intensely visceral and all-but-wordless scenes, there suddenly comes a single uninterrupted shot lasting more than 15 minutes. In this powerful exchange, Sands, seated at a table in a grim prison visiting area, talks with a priest about the meaning and power of words in a struggle where only the language of the body can prevail.