The first reports of Steve McQueen’s Hunger called it ‘controversial’. What they really meant was that the hunger strike in Belfast’s Maze prison that led to the deaths of ten IRA prisoners in 1981 is still a somewhat controversial event. The film has in fact been met with wide acclaim all over the world and even went on to win the Cannes Film Festival’s Camera d’Or for best feature film and the inaugural Sydney Film Festival Prize. Arts Hub’s own Boris Kelly described the film as “a visual and philosophical meditation on the psycho-physical extremes of prison life and the politics of sacrifice”.