"Hunger" Strikes This Weekend
I'm only now just feasting my eyes on the below trailer for first-time helmer, Steve McQueen's critically acclaimed feature, Hunger, about Irish Republican Army (IRA) member Bobby Sands' last six weeks of life during a hunger strike in prison in 1981.
Adjectives such as "riveting" and "spine-chilling," amongst many others, have already been daubed onto the film, accompanied by countless servings of praise from audiences and critics who have been lucky enough to see the completed feature.
The film first premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where it went on to win the coveted Camera d'Or award (best first film), beginning a course on which it would later garner several more nominations and awards at other festivals and independent film organizations.
You're probably wondering why I'm bothering to mention a film about an IRA member who died almost 30 years ago, on this blog; I do so because the writer and director of the film (Steve McQueen) is of African descent (that's his picture above) - specifically black British. This wasn't just some director-for-hire job for McQueen. It was very much a labor of love, and a story he really wanted to tell, and thus devoted quite a bit of his life to see it all the way through. And that should be commended!
IFC Films is distributing it here in the US in limited theaters, beginning this Friday, the 5th of December.
The below trailer doesn't excite me. I feel like I already have a sense of what it's going to look, sound and feel like - at least, in terms of style - and that's not necessarily a good thing, because there's a familiarity there that immediately draws comparisons to similar beautifully minimalist features, and that does very little for me, quite frankly.
However, I'll still likely see it, if only to satisfy whatever curiosity I have for it.
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