Hunger

I recently went to see Hunger, a film about the 1981 hunger strike in Northern Ireland, and more particularly about Bobby Sands, the first of the men to go on hunger strike and the first to die.

For me at least the film was unsatisfying. The hunger strikes had been such a large part of my own life at the time that I learned nothing new, either factually or emotionally. I know what happened, and I knew the passions on both sides - passions I shared, I would have been at Bobby Sands funeral if it had not coincided with my university exams.

The most strange thing about the film is the way it completely ignores everything that happened outside the prison, with the exception of the assassination of one prison guard. By doing so, it gives the impression that the hunger strikes were an intimate action that happened only within the secrecy of the prison, when in fact they represented a massive explosion of popular anger and activism. Hundreds of thousands of people marched, organised, agitated, and voted in support of the hunger strikers, but this was ignored in the film. The fact that Bobby Sands was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone during his hunger strike was relegated to a mere title at the end of the film. Yet this is a fact that remains significant in Northern Irish politics a generation later.

Clearly the producer (Steve McQueen) set out to present only the intimacy of Bobby Sands life and death in the prison, but to an audience ignorant of the background this could have the effect of making the whole thing seem irrelevant. I watched the film in a Brussels cinema surrounded by Belgians who, in all likelihood, did not even recognise the voice-over of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps believing her entirely one-sided statements to reflect a 'neutral' narrator. The bilingual subtitling did not make clear that the drawling voice was one of the main protagonists in the story.