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Life of Bobby Sands to be brought to small screen THE
life of Bobby Sands will soon be explored on the television screen.
Steve McQueen a Turner Prize winner has confirmed that a feature film
of the hunger striker’s life will begin shooting in September.
The film entitled Hunger focuses on the last six weeks of Sands’
life in 1981.
Mr McQueen is best known for his award-winning video about the life of
Buster Keaton which won the Turner Prize in 1999.
Insisting that Hunger will be non-political, he said: “It will be
a film with international contemporary resonance. The body as a 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. The film
will be a meditation on what it is like to die for a cause.”
The filming will take place in the North of Ireland and is co-financed
by Channel 4, which will broadcast the feature on television next year.
The rights to worldwide sales are being sold in Cannes.
Channel 4 commissioning editor for arts Jan Younghusband said: “Steve
McQueen is an exceptional artist and filmmaker whose work in galleries
has transformed our experience of the visual arts.”
In spite of the assertion that it will be non-political, the film is likely
to be divisive and resurrect tensions within the Loyalist community.
Bobby Sands died in the Maze Prison after refusing food for 66 days.
Elected as an MP while incarcerated, his hunger strike was a protest at
the refusal of the British Government’s to grant IRA members political
prisoner status.
He was the first of 10 prisoners to die while on hunger strike.
The campaign galvanised Nationalist politics in the North of Ireland but
also marked the start of an escalation in the IRA’s campaign.
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