FilmFour to cover Bobby Sands’ last days
Ben Dowell
Tuesday June 6, 2006
FilmFour is developing a film based on the last six weeks of the life of the Irish republican hunger striker Bobby Sands.
Sands: died after 66 days on hunger strike
The film, Hunger, will focus on Sands’ last days in 1981 at the Maze Prison near Belfast, where he was imprisoned for possession for firearms.
An elected MP at the time of his death as well as a poet and writer, Sands died aged 27 after 66 days refusing to take food and has been heralded as a martyr to the republican cause.
To be made by Blast Films, the film has not yet been cast but is expected to get a small theatrical release before it is aired on the channel, probably next year.
Directed by artist Steve McQueen and written by Irish stage and screenwriter Enda Walsh, the commission is part of an initiative at Horseferry Road to work directly with visual artists for the screen.
Artist Sam Taylor-Wood, the darling of the Britart scene, is also in the early stages of developing an opera drama for Channel 4; and the broadcaster’s head of arts, Jan Younghusband, has also commissioned Exodus From Margate, a modern retelling of Moses’ Biblical migration to the Promised Land.
The channel has also signed off on Gadaffi, a joint commission with the English National Opera about the Libyan leader, and has also commissioned an opera called Apollo 11 from the composer Jonathan Dove.
This summer will see The Play’s the Thing, in which the work of a new British playwright is mounted on the West End stage by producer Sonia Friedman.
Programmes planned for the autumn include a four-part series called How Music Works, in which celebrated composer Howard Goodall “strips music down to its barest components”; and in a one-off film, Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak will tell the life of the French artist Toulouse Lautrec.
Making the announcement, Ms Younghusband said the commissions proved that the channel was serious about arts programming.
“I want Channel 4 to provide the canvas for new work and to provide a nurturing and supportive environment for artists, film-makers and writers to express the arts on screen,” she said.
“If we can bring the best of television and film craft to the arts we will succeed in communicating arts to a mainstream audience.”
