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."

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