Steve McQueen never intended to become a director. “I didn’t want to be a filmmaker,” said the British visual artist The Hollywood Reporter in November 2013. “What made me want to make a movie was Bobby Sands.”
Sands, a member of the Northern Ireland IRA who led fellow prisoners in Belfast on a hunger strike in 1981, was the inspiration for McQueen’s directorial debut, Hungry. The film opened the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes in 2008 and, according to the UK Guardian“provoked both applause and strikes” for his staunch look at Sands’ (played by Michael Fassbender) final days, the brutal treatment of prisoners and their hunger strike and “dirty protest”, including refusing to bathe and smearing cell walls with feces and blood.
THR called Hungry “violent, bleak and depressing” noting how Fassbender’s feat, for which he followed a 900-calorie-a-day diet of berries, nuts and sardines, “shows the horrifying effect on a man’s body of completely rejecting nutrition .” Nevertheless, the film earned the Camera d’Or, the festival’s prize for best first feature film.
McQueen – who returns to the Croisette this year with the documentary occupied cityabout Amsterdam under Nazi control during World War II — said van at the time Hungry: “I want to show what it was like to see, hear, smell and feel in the H-Block in 1981. What I want to convey is something you can’t find in books or archives: the ordinary and the special of life in this prison. … My intention is to provoke debate in the public, to challenge our own morality through film.