Film Festival Film #4: Hunger

[bcholmes]

So far, Hunger is the most powerful film I've seen at the festival. The director, Steve McQueen, comes from a background in using film as a visual artist. He's only ever created film for galleries before. But he's brought a very powerful sense of visual aesthetic to this film. And it's stunning.

It's about the hunger strike of provisional IRA member Bobby Sands. But it refuses to act like a standard biopic. It doesn't tell us any history of Bobby -- no neat explanations about how he came to join the IRA or even how he was arrested. Instead what we spend time on in the film is the daily lives of the IRA prisoners. Because Thatcher had refused to recognized them as political prisoners, the IRA prisoners were in a constant protest (blanket and no wash -- meaning that they wouldn't wear prison uniforms, only a blanket, and they refused to bathe). The film showed a lot of very painful scenes involving guards forcibly bathing the prisoners (who were not cooperating in the least) and giving them haircuts. It's brutal to watch.

There's a horrific scene of them being searched for contraband. They're run through a gauntlet of guards in riot gear, each prisoner beaten down with batons before having body cavities searched.

And about two-thirds of the way in to the movie, there's a scene in which Bobby talks to a priest about his plan for a hunger strike. The major part of this scene involves a single shot with no camera movement. Bobby and the priest debate the merits of the hunger strike and the position it might put the IRA's leadership in. This one shot is about ten minutes long and contains a good percentage of the dialogue from the film. During the Q&A, McQueen said that they did four takes. Wow.

It's an intense piece, and very hard to watch at times, but wow am I glad I saw it.

Comments

[sabotabby]

I need to see this.