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16/05/2007
Artist to make Bobby Sands film
A Turner Prize winning artist is to make his first feature film, about the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.
The film, named ‘Hunger’ is set to shoot in September in Northern Ireland, and will concentrate on the last six weeks in the life of Sands, who was the leader of the 1981 IRA hunger strike at the Maze Prison.
It will be the first feature film for McQueen, the film’s writer and co-director, is best known for a 1999 Turner Prize-winning video inspired by Buster Keaton.
Award-winning screenwriter and playwright Enda Walsh will also be involved.
McQueen said: “Hunger will be a film with international contemporary resonance. 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.”
Michael Fassbender, who starred in ‘300’ is set to star as Bobby Sands.
Sands, 27, died in May 1981, shortly after being elected an MP. He refused food for 66 days in a political protest, and was the first of 10 men to die.
(JM/SP)
The film, named ‘Hunger’ is set to shoot in September in Northern Ireland, and will concentrate on the last six weeks in the life of Sands, who was the leader of the 1981 IRA hunger strike at the Maze Prison.
It will be the first feature film for McQueen, the film’s writer and co-director, is best known for a 1999 Turner Prize-winning video inspired by Buster Keaton.
Award-winning screenwriter and playwright Enda Walsh will also be involved.
McQueen said: “Hunger will be a film with international contemporary resonance. 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.”
Michael Fassbender, who starred in ‘300’ is set to star as Bobby Sands.
Sands, 27, died in May 1981, shortly after being elected an MP. He refused food for 66 days in a political protest, and was the first of 10 men to die.
(JM/SP)
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