Results tagged “hunger”

Sometimes in life things happen and there isn't a clear lesson to learn. Perhaps you'll find yourself absolutely destroyed by a case of the flu for a couple of weeks and think "I should have had a flu shot" is the lesson, and then you'll remember that you were on the other side of the country when you became sick, so the flu shot probably wouldn't have helped. But because you're human, and we humans like patterns, you'll probably come up with something else—be it stress or not eating your vitamins—to blame, "learn from," and feel satisfied.

Hunger—which we caught at TIFF and again at the European Film Festival—is perhaps the most tactile movie we have ever seen. The impressionistic docudrama chronicling the prison hunger strike by IRA soldier Bobby Sands and the conditions leading up to his decision to take such extreme action, is all about the body and the things that go into, come out of, and are done to it. The film, the feature debut by British artist Steve McQueen (not that one), thoroughly deglamourizes the notion of deliberately starving oneself, by forcing you to confront the physical consequences of the act; it does for this method of suicide what 2:37 did for wrist cutting.