A young boy is entering a prison. He is forced to undress and is humiliated. He refuses to wear the prison uniform, the clothing of criminals. He considers himself a political prisoner, but is treated like a dangerous terrorist. At the same time a well-groomed man is on his way out from his neat house. He examines the car carefully before he gets inside and turns the ignition key. He is nervous and on his way to work at the prison. This is Belfast and its notorious Maze prison in the early eighties. IRA convicts are in the middle of a hard-line protest. As long as they are not treated like human beings they won’t act like ones. They refuse to wash themselves and dirty everything, the walls are covered with excrements. This protest was part of the struggle for achieving status as political prisoners, a struggle that escalated into hunger strikes that resulted in nine prisoners starving themselves to death.

Hunger is a strong, highly disturbing and important film. The fact that this happened in Ireland in the eighties is almost beyond belief. However, these pictures also seem strangely familiar to us, they remind us of another prison: Abu Ghraib. This is an extreme film about responsibility. Who is to blame? Who accepts responsibility? Who is held responsible?

Ola Lund Renolen