In the Maze prison in 1981, twenty-seven-year-old Bobby Sands went on a hunger strike to protest the British government’s refusal to recognise him and his fellow Republican inmates as political prisoners. McQueen dramatises prison existence and Sands’s final days in a way that is purely experiential, even abstract, a succession of images full of both beauty and horror.

Featuring an intense performance by Michael Fassbender, Hunger is an unflinching, transcendent depiction of what a human being is willing to endure to be heard.