Bath Film Festival 2008

Thanks Film Fest/AMIE for screening Hunger, the directoral debut by visual artist Steve McQueen.

I note Mr Raby's comments elsewhere on this blog regarding the over-reliance upon whiz-bang special effects in so much cinematic output these days. None of that here. McQueen's willingness to let the camera linger and the pared-down approach he takes to cutting between shots pays huge dividends.

It's a film whose power lies in offsetting the emormity and complexity of the ethical issues it seeks to address against the attention it affords to the most intimate and telling details. The pivotal scene - a dialogue between Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a priest (Liam Cunningham) about the religious, ethical and moral dimensions of the hunger strike - is played to an entirely static camera. It's a bravura piece of acting in which every nuance of gesture, voice and phrasing is starkly relevant.

Some critics have said that McQueen's depiction of events is too strongly biased to the republican point of view. I think this film graphically illustrates how dangerous and destructive the entrenched ideological positions of both sides were. I feel it gives equal weight to the extremes of inhumanity and tenderness that the situation gave rise to in both captor and captive.

Much of the impact of the slippery, ethical wrangling that takes place between Sands and the priest in the film's crucial scene is derived from the fact that a crucial facet of the debate - the morality of killing innocent people in pursuit of a political cause - is left to us to insert. Consequently, while that debate is largely absent from the dialogue of the characters on screen it is none-the-less a powerfully omnipresent factor in the mind of the viewer throughout the film.

Go see.