Painful history

I didn't sleep well last night. I am a bit sick and cannot stop coughing. But there was something on my mind too. I saw a beautiful film: Hunger



This film is crude, terribly blunt in the way it shows the process of hunger strike (this is mostly about Bobby Sands, who died after 66 days of hunger strike in a confrontation with the British Government at the beginning of the eighties). This hunger strike was preceded by the Blanket Protest and the Dirty Protest, where IRA and INLA prisoners refused to wear uniforms and stopped washing because they were treated like ordinary convicts and not political prisoners. You can find more here. The prisoners were covering their prison walls with excrement and piss, and then decided to go on hunger strike. 9 men died during this protest, the first one being Bobby Sands, who is a symbol of the Northern Ireland so-called "Troubles" and whose face is painted on a lot of Belfast walls.

I liked this film a lot: it is a hard film, a non compromising one, but I think what I liked the most was the non militant side of it. Victims are everywhere in this film, communities suffer, fathers die, children are brought up in violence, the two sides are broken by silence and ressentment, there is no winner. This is a relief, as the themes around the Northern Ireland conflict are generally debatted with passion and anger (not in the Republic though, which will be another subject of this blog). It is so intelligent from the director to show (in a beautiful photography and with wonderful actors) the human cost and not to take sides (even when McQueen uses Thatcher's speeches and declarations, he doesn't add anything to it. Those are extraordinary to my mind, she showed such a contempt for human life and for the Irish fighters in particular).


In other words, if you want to see a very nice and very honest piece of work, I recommend this film.

One interesting article about the reaction after this film was shown in Belfast. There is hope, let's hang to it.