The week's leading up to the death of Fermanagh/South Tyrone MP Bobby Sands is set to be made into a film and is due to be released next year.

Turner Prize-winning artist, Steve McQueen has confirmed he will co-write and direct the film about the IRA hunger striker who, at the time, was 27 and had been elected as Westminster MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone, and died in the Long Kesh in May 1981, after 66 days on hunger strike. He was an MP for 25 days. He was the leader of the 1981 IRA hunger strike in the jail.

Entitled, 'Hunger' the film focuses on the last six weeks in the life of Sands. Filming begins in Northern Ireland in September.

Mr McQueen, the film's director and co-writer, is best known for a 1999 Turner Prize-winning video which was inspired by Buster Keaton. He suggested that the Sands story had modern relevance.

"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, and worldwide sales rights are being sold in Cannes.

Jan Younghusband, Channel 4 Commissioning Editor for Arts explained that 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."