A POTENTIALLY controversial film on IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands will have its world premiere at next month's Cannes Film Festival.
The film, Hunger, concentrates on the last six weeks in the life of Sands, who was 27 when he died in the Maze Prison in May 1981, shortly after being elected an MP.
The screenplay for Hungeris by Irish playwright Enda Walsh, whose critically acclaimed plays have included Disco Pigs, Bedboundand The Walworth Farce.
The film is the first directed by Steve McQueen, the British artist who won the Turner Prize in 1999. " Hungerwill be a film with international contemporary resonance," McQueen says.
"The body as site of political warfare is becoming a more familiar phenomenon. It is the final act of desperation. Your own body is your last resource for protest. One uses what one has, rightly or wrongly.
"What I want to convey is something you can't find in books or archive, the ordinariness and extraordinariness of life in this prison. Yet also the film is an abstraction in a certain way, a meditation on what it is like to die for a cause."
In Hunger, Bobby Sands is played by German-born, Killarney-raised actor Michael Fassbender (31), who featured as Steliosin the historical epic 300, a major box-office success last year.
He first came to fame in a Guinness commercial, as a man who swims the Atlantic to heal a rift with a friend in the US. At the Edinburgh festival in 2006, he played Michael Collins in the play Allegiance, which featured Mel Smith as Winston Churchill.
Interviewed in The Irish Timeslast year shortly before Hungerstarted filming, Fassbender said: "Naturally for us in Ireland the theme has special interest, but the unique way in which Steve McQueen will tell the story is something new."
Dublin actor Liam Cunningham features as a priest in the film, which was financed by Channel 4, Northern Ireland Screen and the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland. It is hotly tipped for the prestigious slot of opening the official Cannes sidebar section, Un Certain Regard.
With more than 4,000 international journalists, the Cannes festival is a magnet for controversy. Some of the British media have been critical of Cannes entries dealing with Irish politics, among them Terry George's Some Mother's Son, in which John Lynch played Bobby Sands, and the Ken Loach films Hidden Agendaand The Wind that Shakes the Barley, the latter of which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2006.
The 61st Cannes Film Festival runs from May 14th to 25th.