The most powerful film at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Hunger captures the life and death of Bobby Sands, a highly controversial figure in recent British and Irish history.

Celebrated English video artist Steve McQueen brings a visceral intensity to his retelling of the hunger strike instigated by prisoner Bobby Sands and several other detained Irish Republican Army members in the early 1980s.

A group of IRA members imprisoned in Northern Ireland’s notorious H-Block prison starve themselves to protest the British government’s refusal to acknowledge them as political prisoners rather than criminals. The film graphically depicts the ways in which prisoners were tortured, the life-threatening risks faced by prison officials and ultimately the fatal impact of the hunger strike on its leader, Bobby Sands. McQueen spares nothing in conveying the prisoners’ hardships as they try to achieve justice through the hunger strike and make the ultimate sacrifice in excruciating circumstances.

One of the more exciting directorial debuts in recent memory, Hunger is a riveting, harrowing, true story that forces us to examine exactly what’s involved in putting your life on the line for a cause.