Directed by Steve McQueen • 2008 • Ireland, United Kingdom
Starring Michael Fassbender, Stuart Graham, Liam Cunningham
With HUNGER, British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen has turned one of history’s most controversial acts of political defiance into a jarring, unforgettable cinematic experience. In Northern Ireland’s Maze prison in 1981, twenty-seven-year-old Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands went on a hunger strike to protest the British government’s refusal to recognize him and his fellow IRA inmates as political prisoners. McQueen dramatizes prison existence and Sands’s final days in a way that is purely experiential, even abstract, a succession of images full of both beauty and horror. Featuring an intense performance by Michael Fassbender, HUNGER is an unflinching, transcendent depiction of what a human being is willing to endure to be heard.
Up Next in 21st Century Cinema
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Life During Wartime
Directed by Todd Solondz • 2010 • United States
Starring Ally Sheedy, Allison Janney, Ciarán HindsIn LIFE DURING WARTIME, independent filmmaker Todd Solondz explores contemporary American existence and the nature of forgiveness with his customary dry humor and queasy precision. The film functio...
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Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 2010 • Italy
Starring Juliette Binoche, William ShimellThe great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami travels to Tuscany for a luminous and provocative romance in which nothing is as it appears. What seems at first to be a straightforward tale of two people—played by...
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Beyond the Hills
Directed by Cristian Mungiu • 2012 • Romania
Starring Cristina Flutur, Cosmina StratanWith this arresting drama based on notorious real-life events, Cristian Mungiu mounts a complex inquiry into faith, fanaticism, and indifference. At a desolate Romanian monastery, a young novice nun, Voichita ...
