This startlingly intense political and human drama tells the harrowing story of IRA leader Bobby Sands and his fellow prisoners in the hands of British authorities in the early 1980s.

The imprisonment and cruel treatment of Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners — and the starvation death of one of its iconic leaders, Bobby Sands — is dramatized in this gut-wrenching drama ,which was awarded the Caméra d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. The film is set in 1981 — a period of political upheaval in Northern Ireland and to a lesser extend in Britain itself — as the IRA engage in a terrorist war against the Protestant and British authorities in their pursuit of a united Ireland. It is in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison where convicted IRA members are sent and where, behind the imposing stone walls and out of the public’s eye, the political prisoners face cruel treatment at the hands of the British authorities (eliciting comparisons to Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo for viewers). The men are stripped naked, beaten and starved; spurred by the authorities’ decision to deny them the status of political prisoners, they revolt in their own fashion. This startling directorial debut by Anglo-African visual artist Steve McQueen stars Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, a fellow prisoner who becomes a leader, hero and inspiration when he decides to sacrifice himself for the movement with a hunger strike. Fassbender’s is an amazingly transformative performance — magnetic yet human, intense yet increasingly frail, quiet yet strong. A highlight of the film is a single-take discussion between Sands and a priest (Liam Cunningham) who discuss, in an eerily composed fashion, the merits of political dissent. Rarely has a film so successfully transported the audience into an inescapable hell, one in which torture, deprivation and psychological assault reign, but where human strength still prevails. The result is an uncompromising drama of one man’s harrowing triumph through pain and death. Please be warned, this film depicts a reality rarely seen in any film so the sensitive or fainthearted should stay away. -- Ray Murray