"Hunger" tells the struggle between faith, body and politics. Director McQueen prefers long shots and large dialogues with blank spaces, and he is very cautious and particular about editing each shot.
The film focuses on the hunger strike in 1981 and revolves around the life of the Northern Irish Republican Army prisoner Bobby Sands in the last six weeks before his death. As the debut of Steve McQueen's feature film, the chosen subject matter inevitably caused huge controversy, but the film won the British Modern Art Award, which is the most watched in Britain.
"Hunger" is director Steve McQueen's film debut. The shots are calm and the images have a strong documentary style. Although the Northern Irish Republican Army’s political struggle for independence was "transferred" to prison, the brutal life and death struggles all revolved around the body trapped in the prison: the dead body, through the enlarged naked body, hair and beard, hands and feet And muscle atrophy, wounds, ulcers, blood in the stool, and fainting convey the radical nature of the Republican Army’s ideology, and the most intimate body has become the most active public sphere—weak flesh and radical politics are in such heterogeneity. Contradictions and conflicts unfolding in space.
The most metaphorical part of the film is the detail of Sands being forced or even violently cut off his hair. Using the allusion of the fighter Samson in "Judges of the Old Testament", the body of Sands and the body of Jesus are "imagined". "Generally equivalent, the body becomes the last place of politics, the body becomes the symbol of politics, and the flesh is power.
