Artist Steve McQueen profiles an IRA icon in his visceral directorial debut.

For all the lyrical rhetoric, fiction and poetry devoted to Northern Ireland’s “troubles,” the latest film to take on the centuries-old conflict manages to do so with very few words.
Hunger, winner of a slew of awards including the Cannes Film Festival’s Camera d’Or, chronicles the 1981 hunger strike of Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteer Robert Gerard “Bobby” Sands inside the infamous Her Majesty’s Maze Prison.
Images of Sands still adorn murals throughout Belfast. A key figure in the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland between the late 1960s and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, he remains a despised and revered symbol of violent protest. While peace has prevailed in the decade since, last month’s murder of a British policeman served as a reminder of the region’s fragility.
It seems an unusually slippery subject for an English installation film artist to take for his directorial debut. A recipient of the Turner Prize (Britain’s most prominent art award) and the UK’s chosen representative to the Venice Biennale, McQueen insists he undertook the project determined not to give a platform to either the villainous or heroic sides of Sands.
“I’m not afraid of politics, it’s not about not wanting it to be about politics,” McQueen says. “It is steeped in politics, but…it’s all about being human in a situation where one has to sort of make a situation that is extraordinarily ordinary in a way.”
Hunger opens with the clanging of pots against a black backdrop. The camera lingers on a guard’s breakfast—eggs, bacon, coffee, crumbs on a napkin—then on a bloodied sink, bruised knuckles and a fly resting on prison grating.
It was the memory of an image that drew McQueen to choose to tell Sands’s story in the first place.
Watching television in 1981, he remembers seeing Sands’s picture with a number that changed each day signifying the duration of his fast. He undertook the hunger strike to regain his fellow IRA inmates’ special category status as political (rather than common) prisoners.
“The notion for me as an 11-year-old where someone stops eating in order to be heard was a bit strange,” McQueen says. The impact of that event, combined with the Brixton race riots and the championship season of the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, made 1981 for McQueen “really kind of an important time, a coming-of-age situation.”
At the film’s heart—a 20-minute stretch of dialogue between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and Catholic priest Father Moran (Liam Cunningham)—McQueen draws on his skills as an artist. The priest’s face is only clearly visible in the conversation’s final minutes, when he says, “I don’t think I’m going to see you again, Bobby.”
McQueen says he employed the technique to create a simultaneous sense of intimacy and distance in the audience, a feeling that they need to lean forward. It’s a brief but vital interlude before McQueen moves to a dialogue-light final section documenting Sands’s dying days.
The exchanges between Sands and Moran about the logic of the strike, which gets down to the value of freedom versus the value of life, matches the film’s often-grotesque visuals in its unflinching harshness.
To Sands’s challenge, “so what, God’s going to punish me?,” Moran snaps back with “well if not just for the suicide, then he’d also have to punish you for stupidity.”
Ultimately, McQueen’s intent was to try to understand why Sands acted as he did. To do that, he reached out for a co-screenwriter, eventually landing on Irishman Enda Walsh. “It was one of those funny things where we got on extraordinarily well, finishing each other’s sentences by the end of the day…When you work on your own for such a long time, you never think that you can have that kind of relationship.”
Hunger is rolling out nationally through April, and is also now viewable on the Independent Film Channel’s video-on-demand site.