Austin Film Festival Preview: Hunger


Lori Heuring suppresses her Hunger
Austin Film Festival: Hunger
Friday, October 23rd @ 10 p.m. and Sunday, October 25th @ 7:30 p.m.
Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek (17329 Research Blvd)
$9, general admission, Free for Badge and Pass Holders
[info] | [tickets]
You can look around at various injustices in the world and in a sotto voice decry, "Oh, the humanity!" But what does that really mean? What defines our humanity? Is it social constructs? Is it chemical reactions in our brain the cause us to react to certain situations, images or ideas in a predestined way? What if you are put into a situation where the confines of your own humanity are tested outside the bounds of what you thought was possible? Perhaps you would find that your own humanity differs from those around you and that in the end we are all just animals, attempting to survive in a cruel and graceless world. Hunger, a new film by writer/director Steven Hentges, explores these basic instincts in a dark and brooding new way.


At the core, Hunger is a movie about control. It begins in a vacuum, a dark, almost sensory deprivation like chamber where Hentges dictates what the viewer can and cannot see, simply by withholding light from the frame. There are ghosted images of faces, outlines of bodies parts, but the only thing that gives you any sense of action during the first 15 minutes are the panic-filled voices of characters who you are soon to meet. You know already that something is terribly wrong, but you have no indication of the acts that are to follow, until someone, a deranged puppet master of sorts, flips on a light. In this blinding revelation you meet five people, none of whom know each other, who are trapped in an underground dungeon, with nothing but four 80 gallon drums of water, a numberless clock and a deep sense of foreboding. How long will they be there? Who is it that put them there? Why were they chosen? And how can they escape?

The next 60 minutes of the film play with these characters like a chess set. Little by little the past transgressions of each of their lives are revealed, giving the viewer insight into why they were chosen for this experiment in starvation and week by week you get a glimpse into the horrific childhood accident that caused their captor to hold them in the first place. As you could imagine, the test subjects go through periods of hope, apathy, depression and finally, a most gruesome mania, where the ownership of a single strategically afforded scalpel determines what version of humanity will survive ad which version will perish.

Its possible that survival is the most deep seated aspect of humanity, and you have to ask yourself, if someone has to die so that others can live, what lengths would you go to to ensure that you don't draw the short straw?

Hunger appears as part of the Dark Matters category at the Austin Film Festival. The full AFF schedule can be seen here.

user-pic
By oh, steph in on October 20, 2009 2:45 PM 0 Comments 4 Likes Likes

Tags:

Email This Entry


Post a comment (Comment Policy)

Home

Tips

About Austinist

Austinist is a news and culture website about Austin, Texas. We publish Monday through Friday, and also maintain a guide to local arts and entertainment events that we call the Weekly IST List.

Editor: Allen Y Chen
Publisher: Gothamist

About Us & Advertising | Archives | Contact | Mobile | RSS | Staff

Recent Comments

Dig It

Most Popular

More

Contribute

Latest Tip:

where's the public outcry over the condition of waterloo park?
[more]

Latest Photo:

CONTRIBUTE NOW!

Subscribe

Use an RSS reader to stay up to date with the latest news and posts from Austinist.

All Our RSS