Hunger

Hunger (2008) is Steve McQueen's historical drama, and you can watch online on iFILM. It marks his feature debut, with Michael Fassbender as IRA prisoner Bobby Sands.

The whole film stays inside Northern Ireland's Maze prison. Republican inmates demand to be treated as political prisoners rather than criminals. First comes the dirty protest: refusing the uniform, going unwashed, smearing the cell walls with filth. The guards answer with forced haircuts, freezing hose-downs and beatings. When none of it moves the government, Sands turns to the one thing left under his control and stops eating. At the heart of the picture sits a near-silent conversation between Sands and a priest, played by Liam Cunningham and shot in a single seventeen-minute take.

McQueen, a video artist before this, tells the 1981 story almost without dialogue, leaning on the body, dripping water and long corridors of quiet. The film took the Camera d'Or at Cannes and put both men on the map. Stream Hunger (2008) online on iFILM.