Jim Sheridan is, with Neil Jordan, one of our most prominent film-makers. Unlike Jordan, who has made films set in Britain and the United States, Sheridan's constant emphasis has been on telling Irish stories - but in a tough, direct and sweeping style that can only be described as "Hollywood".

His films could not be described as "arty" or "difficult"; each has a strong, clear beginning, middle and end.

Sheridan comes from the Sheriff Street area of Dublin's north inner city. After working in the capital's theatre scene, he spent most of the 1980s working on small stage productions in New York, before his massive movie breakthrough with the Oscar-winning My Left Foot.

Into the West is typical of his films in at least one way: it is deeply concerned with family relationships and the responsibilities that endure among family members.

His first three films as a writer-director have been based on other people's stories. My Left Foot (1989) is drawn from the writings of Christy Brown, the Dublin author who struggled through his severe physical disability. The Field (1990) is based on John B. Keane's play (and also featured Travellers, though they were rural-based Travellers of the 1930s). And In the Name of the Father (1993) is the fact-based story of Gerry Conlon, who was wrongly imprisoned for an IRA bombing.

However, Sheridan put his own distinct mark on this material, often controversially. In particular, the "poetic licence" he took with the Conlon story drew sharp criticism from most shades of political opinion in Britain and Ireland.

This does not seem to have steered him away from political material. He went on to write, with Terry George (a former republican prisoner and also co-writer of In the Name of the Father), a film set during the 1981 hunger strikes, Some Mother's Son (1996), which George directed.

His fourth and newest film as both writer and director is The Boxer, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a ex-IRA man who comes out of prison to take up the prize-fighting career he left behind 14 years earlier. As well as the boxing and the inevitable love interest, it explores the pre-ceasefire tensions in the Belfast IRA.

The Boxer is due for premiere at the end of this year.