HUNGER follows life in the Maze Prison, Northern Ireland with an interpretation of the highly emotive events surrounding the 1981 IRA hunger strike, led by Bobby Sands. With an epic eye for detail, the film provides a timely exploration of what happens when body and mind are pushed to the uttermost limit.

I want to show what it was like to see, hear, smell and touch in the H-block in 1981. What I want to convey is something you cannot find in books or archives: the ordinary and extraordinary, of life in this prison. Yet the film is also an abstraction of what it is to die for a cause.
HUNGER for me has contemporary resonance. The body as site of political warfare is becoming a more familiar phenomenon. It is the final act of desperation; your own body is your last resource for protest. One uses what one has, rightly or wrongly.
It is important to me that the events are shown through the eyes of both prisoners and prison officers. Within the film there has to be time as well for reflection. There is a long conversation between Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest about Sands's decision to go on a hunger strike. The exchange becomes a philosophical chess game with high stakes. They have to discuss the nature of sacrifice. "Freedom means everything to me... Taking my life is not just the only thing I can do, it is the right thing".
In the end we are alone with one man, living out his last days in the most extreme manner possible - but only one decision away from choosing to surrender and live. The simplest physical action becomes an odyssey.
In HUNGER there is no simplistic notion of 'hero' or 'martyr' or ‘victim'. My intention is to provoke debate in the audience, to challenge our own morality through film.