Kaunas Film Festival introduces the biggest European debut

This October, Kaunas International Film Festival will screen British director's Steve McQueen's Hunger - the film that has been acknowledged the greatest discovery of 2008. The filmmaker's first full feature film combining violence and beauty has been praised by the celebrities of the European film industry.

It is a brutal and visual story about the reality of the 1980s in the British prison called “The Maze” where Irish independence fighters were held. The film won the Caméra d’Or prize in the Cannes Film Festival, a European Film Academy Discovery prize and was acknowledged the best director’s debut in the Stockholm Film Festival.

“The style and the frame composition of the film are fazing. Some of the scenes will stay with you forever. Hunger is a piece of art,” said Tomas Tengmark, producer of the Kaunas International Film Festival’s programme.  “The director builds on the complicated situation of the time, but the political factors are merely the background for the horrible dehumanisation process in the male prison and the bitter clash between the prisoners and their wardens.”

Filmmaker Steve McQueen, a well known video artist from the United Kingdom, is representing his country in the Venice Biennial this year. Hunger is McQueen’s debut on the wide screen. The artist’s first full feature film opened the Un Certain Regard programme in the Cannes Film Festival 2008.

Bobby Sands, the main character of the Hunger, is the Irish Nelson Mandela, except that the end his story is far sadder. The film tells about the prison (kind of a British Guantanamo) where IRA fighters were held during the 1980s and experienced horrible humiliation. Among them was Bobby Sands, the organiser of the prisoners’ hunger strike initiated as a reaction to the disregard for basic human rights. After 66 days of voluntary starvation, Bobby Sands died and become the national icon for the Irish nation. He once said: “It is violence that raises the rebellious spirit of freedom.”

By recreating the moving and dramatic events, the filmmaker aimed to show the body as a place for political struggle: “It is the last action of despair; body as your last means of protest. Either in the right way or wrong, everybody uses what they have,” said McQueen.

Hunger will be screened in the festival’s Wide Angle programme section both in Kaunas and Vilnius. The third Kaunas International Film Festival organised by the public enterprise Visos Mūzos will take place in “Romuva” theatre, Kaunas, October 1-11, and in “Pasaka” theatre, Vilnius, October 12-18. Programme of the festival and information about the tickets will be announced shortly at www.kinofestivalis.lt.