Director Steve McQueen’s first feature film goes deep into the circumstances of a series of prisoner protests in Northern Ireland in 1981.  With a clinical and procedural examination of their bodies both as sites of victimization and instruments of protest, the film considers the cruelty, strategy, determination and oppression of modern incarceration.  Among the inmates, Bobby Sands (played by Michael Fassbender) plans a resolute and deadly hunger strike until his republican brethren have their status as political prisoners reinstated by the British government.  But instead of dwelling on the politics of the time, McQueen methodically and unflinchingly catalogues the degradation of Sands’ body to the ravages of starvation.

If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be reviewing and discussing Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. (1966).