Twenty-six years after he died on hunger strike, IRA martyr Bobby Sands is to be the subject of a new feature film, Hunger. Becker International has picked up worldwide rights to the project, which is being directed by Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen.

Backed by Film4, Hunger comes billed as 'a highly evocative and impressionistic interpretation of the last six weeks in the life of Sands.'

McQueen has co-written the screenplay with award-winning playwright Enda Walsh (Disco Pigs).

Michael Fassbender, recently seen in 300 and Francois Ozon's Angel, stars. The producers are Laura Hastings-Smith and Robin Gutch for Blast! Films. The film is being co-financed by Channel 4, Northern IrelandScreen and the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland.

'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,' McQueen said in a statement.

'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.'

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