When the opening films of the competition and main sideshow at Cannes are called Blindness and Hunger, are we being told something? Blindness we know about: it’s the condition we emerge with at Cannes, like the prisoners in Fidelio, after each screening as the sun batters our pupils and threatens to wash away any too-fragile inner vision from underperforming movies. Hunger we know likewise: the yearning for art’s spiritual nourishment at Cannes amid the parties and restaurants. (It’s a tough job covering this festival but someone has to do it.)

By halfway point, we’re often clamouring for nutrition. But Hunger, British artist-turned-director Steve McQueen’s film of the 1980s Northern Ireland prisoners’ hunger strike, opened Un Certain Regard – the top fringe event at Cannes – with a grimly sustaining feast. McQueen, a former Turner Prize honoree, had the painterly brainwave of doing the story as a triptych. Part one depicts the “blankets and hygiene” strike, that long protest vigil in which IRA detainees repudiated convict clothes and smeared their walls with faeces in response to the UK’s refusal to grant them political status.