Film tackles IRA leader Bobby Sands hunger strike

• IBTimes RSS
• Print
• E-Mail
• digg
• Del.icio.us

McQueen, who has won the Turner art prize, drew parallels between abuses by authorities in the Maze prison and the treatment of inmates at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

"The fact of the matter is that history does repeat itself," said McQueen, who first conceived the idea of making a film about Sands before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The latter part of "Hunger" portrays what Sands went through during his 66-day hunger strike that resulted in his death, aged 27, in 1981.

Close-ups of bed sores and his decaying body are as difficult to watch as earlier scenes of cell walls smeared in faeces and ritual beatings of inmates by riot police.

Fassbender lost around 15 kg through a strict diet of nuts, berries and sardines for weeks.

He said he was nervous playing such a controversial figure from Northern Ireland's recent past.

"It worries me very much," he told Reuters. "It worried me when I decided to do the project because all my relatives are up there," added Fassbender, who is from the Republic of Ireland but whose mother comes from the partitioned North.

"The last thing I want to do is be part of something that sparks up aggression," he said.

A 1998 peace agreement largely ended 30 years of violence in the province. The conflict killed more than 3,600 people.

Sands was the first of 10 Maze prisoners to die in the hunger strike, which they staged in order to win IRA prisoners political status.

• 1
• 2
• 3