2009 AFI Dallas Film Festival - Hunger

(UK, Ireland, 2008, 96 mins)
35mm
Dallas/Ft Worth Premiere
Directed By: Steve McQueen

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 well into the film when, in a coup de cinema, he describes his motivations in one extraordinary continuous shot.

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 only cinema might: the dark recesses of the human psyche.

Information from the festival's website