Premiere for Boyne film in Dublin

THE FILM of John Boyne's award-winning novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas will have its world premiere at the Savoy cinema in Dublin on September 4th. The author will attend with Mark Herman, the English writer-director who adapted the book for the screen and directed the film.

The story charts the friendship between two boys, Bruno (played by Asa Butterfield), whose father is appointed as commandant at a Nazi concentration camp, and Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a Jewish boy imprisoned in the camp.

The role of the commandant is played by David Thewlis, who won the best actor award at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival and plays Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter films. Thewlis will be among the guests at the Dublin premiere, as will rising actor Rupert Friend, who is cast as a young Nazi soldier, and veteran Irish actor Jim Norton, who plays the tutor hired to educate Bruno and his sister.

The film will be a major hit if it comes close to matching the success of the book, which has been translated into 35 languages and has sold more than three million copies.

"It seems highly appropriate that the film will have its world premiere in the city where the book was written," Boyne said yesterday. "And the screening will be just down the road from the Irish Writers' Centre, where the book was launched, and it will be in the Savoy, the cinema where I grew up."

The premiere is in association with Amnesty International Ireland. The organisation's executive director, Colm O'Gorman, said: "This powerful and evocative film is particularly timely as we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was formulated in response to the horrors of the second World War."

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas will be released at 30 Irish cinemas on September 12th and goes on UK release the same day.

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times