Hunger

Bea says: Although this film was on our list, Cecil and I ended up seeing it off the cuff, as the session time for a different film we had planned to see had changed. The film is a deeply, deeply disturbing portrayal of the regime of the Maze prison in Northern Ireland in 1981, and recounts the hunger strike of Bobby Sands in that prison. I was prepared for the images of the hunger strike - what I wasn't prepared for was the sheer brutality of life in the Maze prison. It was at times unbearable to watch, and I am neither particularly squeamish or naive. It was however an extremely compelling film - possibly in part because I was a still a child at the time the events took place, although I remember Bobby Sands' name well from hearing it on the 6 o clock news, and the film filled in some detail for me, although perhaps detail I would rather not have known. I came away feeling shellshocked and traumatised (and that was just watching the events, not living them - how people, and those close to them, survived it I cannot imagine). The horrific events have stayed with me, as have the interspersed speeches of Thatcher from the era, and a sense of despair at what humans are capable of.
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Cecil says: I am kind of glad my work trip to Belfast was a few days BEFORE I saw this film rather than after. As it is, it's very hard not to make some sort of mistake in apparently favouring one side of the sectarian divide rather than the other as soon as you do anything organised in Northern Ireland. But, if I had gone there with this film still clouding my vision, I don't think I could have chatted to the taxi driver, or the librarian or the hotel manager without wondering what they were doing during the worst of the Troubles.

What this film did for me was to transport me back to those horrible days of the early 1980s. The music may have been great then but the politics of the UK was descending into the nasty, divisive state epitomised by events in Northern Ireland. The thing I disliked most about what Thatcher did for me was the way she instilled such deep hatred in me - I have never before or after felt that constant anger and hatred I lived with throughout her time in power; she managed to divide this country into the minority who loved her and constantly voted her back in, and the - sadly smaller - minority who hated her with as much passion as I did.

And this film somehow epitomised the divided society we lived in then. In the rest of the UK, the divide was political; in Northern Ireland it was sectarian, but the emotions felt the same, watching this film.

I don't know how accurate the portrayal of events in Hunger is (I tried afterwards to find blogs by Unionists who may have had a different take on events, but didn't really find any); but in a sense, it doesn't matter how true to reality they were, because what the film did succeed in doing was to depict that divided society and the hostility that was felt across that divide.

By the way: we actually went to this film because we were intrigued that Steve McQueen had turned his Hollywood dollars to a film about the IRA. I got home and tried to find out more about when McQueen might have become interested in Northern Irish politics only to remember that the Hollywood great died in 1980 (before this film's events even took place) and this particular Steve McQueen was making his film debut with Hunger. I'm not sure I'm desperate to see his 2nd film...

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