Hunger

Steve McQueen's Hunger won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes 2008 (the festival prize for the best first feature) and was nominated for the BAFTA for Best British Film. The film was McQueen's debut feature; he had been a Turner Prize-winning visual artist with no prior film direction experience. Hunger consolidated McQueen as one of the most distinctive British directors of his generation, and Michael Fassbender, in the central role, as a major leading-man career.

The film is set in the Maze Prison (HMP Maze, the H-Blocks) in Northern Ireland in late 1980 and early 1981, during the campaign by Irish republican prisoners for political-prisoner status under the British government. The film follows three central figures across this period: Bobby Sands (Fassbender), the IRA prisoner who would lead the eventual hunger strike of 1981; Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan), a younger prisoner just admitted to the H-Blocks; and Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), one of the prison officers. Liam Cunningham plays the priest Father Dominic Moran in a single sustained dialogue scene.

The film's central seventeen-minute scene (a single static-camera dialogue between Sands and the priest in the prison-visit room) is widely considered one of the most demanding extended sequences in recent British cinema. Sean Bobbitt's photography, McQueen's commitment to long static frames and procedural realism, and the central performances combined into a film that has steadily climbed in critical estimation. McQueen would go on to Shame (2011), 12 Years a Slave (2013) (the Best Picture Oscar winner) and continuing major-prize work.