'Hunger', a biopic on Northern Irish prisoner Bobby Sands who died after 66 days on hunger strike, won the Cannes Camera d'Or prize for the best first feature film on Sunday.

British artist-turned-director Steve McQueen accepted the award from US actor Dennis Hopper for the film about the Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoner whose 1981 death elevated him to martyr status.

It is likely to spark controversy in Britain where some commentators have denounced it as a celebration of a terrorist whose protests were part of an epic battle of wills with then British premier Margaret Thatcher.

But director Steve McQueen (38) told AFP during the festival he had not portrayed Sands as a hero in the film, which gives a violent and brutal depiction of life in the Maze prison near Belfast.

"I'm not saying I agree or disagree with Bobby Sands, what I'm saying is I don't know," he said. "The film is about people making decisions, bad or right decisions, and the consequences of that."

But he did say there were parallels between the now-closed Maze prison in 1981 and what has happened more recently in the US detention centre in Guantanamo in Cuba and the US-run Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

'Hunger', starring Michael Fassbender, tells the story of the decision by Sands and other IRA inmates to go on hunger strike in the Maze to demand political prisoner status.

Sands had been jailed on firearms offences he was accused of committing as part of the IRA's deadly campaign to end British rule of Northern Ireland and unite the Protestant-dominated province with the largely Catholic Republic of Ireland.

He and his fellow inmates had previously carried out various actions to gain political status, including the notorious "dirty protest" in which they wore only blankets and smeared their own excrement on their cell walls.

But Thatcher refused to give in to their demands and the hunger protest began. Sands, who got elected to the British parliament during his strike, was the first of 10 prisoners to die over the following weeks.

Hero or martyr

'Hunger' recounts the last weeks of Sands' life in graphic detail, showing the brutality of prison warders and the horrifically decline of Sands' emaciated body.

The British viewpoint gets scant mention, mostly through the disembodied voice of Thatcher on the radio.

But McQueen insisted he was not dealing in simplistic stereotypes of hero or martyr, but seeking to make people "reflect on what went on in an adult, intelligent fashion".

The media coverage of the Maze hunger strike sparked a wave of sympathy around the world for Sands and his fellow strikers, whose deaths resulted in a surge of IRA activity and an escalation of violence in Northern Ireland.

A 1996 film on Sands' life, 'Some Mother's Son', sparked controversy when it screened in Cannes in 1996.

McQueen is an official war artist in Britain and a winner of its prestigious Turner prize.

He previously sparked controversy when he produced a series of postage stamps showing the faces of soldiers killed in the current Iraq conflict.

AFP