Hunger - The Criterion Collection (Blu-ray)

With Hunger, British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen has turned one of history’s most controversial acts of political defiance into a jarring, unforgettable cinematic experience. In Northern Ireland’s Maze prison in 1981, twenty-seven-year-old Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands went on a hunger strike to protest the British government’s refusal to recognize him and his fellow IRA inmates as political prisoners. McQueen dramatizes prison existence and Sands’s final days in a way that is purely experiential, even abstract, a succession of images full of both beauty and horror. Featuring an intense performance by Michael Fassbender, Hunger is an unflinching, transcendent depiction of what a human being is willing to endure to be heard.

• Ireland, United Kingdom
• 96 minutes
• Color
• 2.35:1
• English
• Spine #504
• 2008

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

- New, restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Steve McQueen, with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Video interviews with McQueen and actor Michael Fassbender
- A short documentary on the making of Hunger, including interviews with McQueen, Fassbender, actors Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham, and Brian Milligan, writer Enda Walsh, and producer Robin -Gutch
- “The Provo’s Last Card?,” a 1981 episode of the BBC program Panorama, about the Maze prison hunger strikes and the political and civilian reactions across Northern Ireland
- Theatrical trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: A new essay by film critic Chris Darke

*New cover by Rasmus Alkestrand