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Turner Prize winner to make Bobby Sands film
16.05.07
Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen has confirmed his first feature film - about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.
Hunger focuses on the last six weeks in the life of Sands, leader of the 1981 IRA hunger strike at the notorious Maze prison. Filming begins in Northern Ireland in September. McQueen, the film's director and co-writer, is best known for a 1999 Turner Prize-winning video inspired by Buster Keaton.
The video artist said the story had modern relevance. He 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."
The film is being co-financed by Channel 4 for broadcast on TV next year, while worldwide sales rights are being sold in Cannes. Jan Younghusband, Channel 4 Commissioning Editor for Arts, said: "Channel 4 regularly commissions new work from artists for the screen, galleries,
public spaces and theatre.
"Steve McQueen is an exceptional artist and filmmaker whose work in galleries has transformed our experience of the visual arts.
"I am delighted to commission his first feature film which revisits, through the unique perspective of an artist, this crucial moment in
Anglo-Irish history."
Reader views (4)
sands simply did what was right and most of britain still cant handle that. when ones country is invaded and occupied one is obliged to fight with everything. that is the lesson from the horrible witch of orleans, joan of arc, to the horrible terrorist bobby sands.
- Joseph Sibanda, harare, zimbabwe
I have just watched the film, Hunger, and it brought me to tears at the site of those " human beings" for that is what they are, at how ignorant the British Government are when it comes to Ireland.
I believe it is a lesson for governments to learn from, that you cannot defeat a cause that people hold sacred. I live almost 1 mile from the home of Bobby sands and it fills me with great pride that he is so close to me. Watching that film filled me with anger and hurt; but also fear, fear that such an inner belief is possible.
I accept that Bobby sands was part of a movement that people may perceive as " Terrorist" but having grew up and live in Belfast I believe firmly that there was no other option open to my community.
Thatcher in the end lost I believe, Bobby Sands spirit has lifted people others throughout the world and the day that I have children they will come to know of this noble man of " Humanity".
" No greater love hath no man than this, than to lay his life down for his friends and beliefs".
- Thomas Mccullough, Belfast.
As a relative of someone killed by the IRA, I still respect the hunger strikers' determination to attain their goal of political status. However, I hope this film gives a balanced picture of the times and does not just take the easy route of painting Sands as a saint. I have respect for Steve McQueen following his work about British soldiers killed in Iraq and I hope he will realise that British soldiers were in a similar position in Northern Ireland. American soldiers are now finding out in Iraq how difficult it is to fight in a guerilla situation. Even now in Guantanamo there are people who the US refuse to see as prisoners of war and grant political status to. It is a complex issue and I hope McQueen does it justice.
- Rita, Nottingham, England
I am especially struck by Turner’s remark about, “The body as site of political warfare”, being aware that Turner’s own body is that of a Black man. I was a Civil Rights worker in the American South and was also present at some hunger striker’s funerals in the North of Ireland. And I think its obvious that discrimination there, against an Irish ethnic group often misleadingly labeled as “Catholics”, was/is very similar to that against Blacks and groups, such as Mexican Americans, in the USA.
And a Black man who lives in a predominantly White society, however seemingly “tolerant”, cannot help but be aware that his own body is really still always a “site of warfare”, at many levels, both cultural and political. So the very fact that McQueen brings his uniquely sensitive personal perspective to a film on the North Irish hunger strikers, really ties together the fact of the bodies of all oppressed people as “sites of warfare” in a way particularly apt way, especially at this particular time.
- David Irby, Dingle, Ireland
