The Northern Ireland drama, Five Minutes of Heaven, received two major awards on Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Founded by Robert Redford, the event is the most important annual film festival in the US.
Oliver Hirschbiegel was given the festival¿s World Cinema award for Best Director for Five Minutes of
Heaven, which took a second prize for its screenwriter, Guy Hibbert. Dublin-based Element Pictures will release the film in Ireland in March.
The film dramatises the story of Alistair Little, a young Ulster Volunteer Force member who spent 12 years in prison for the murder of Jim Griffin, a 19-year-old Catholic, in Lurgan in 1975. The victim¿s 11-year-old brother Joe was a witness.
Most of the drama takes place during an attempted reconciliation 33 years after the killing. Liam Neeson, who is from Ballymena, plays Alistair Little as an adult, with Coleraine native James Nesbitt as the grown-up Joe Griffin.
Oliver Hirschbiegel, the German director of the film, made the Oscar-nominated Downfall (2004), which dealt with the last days in the life of Adolf Hitler. Guy Hibbert, the British screenwriter of Five Minutes of Heaven, wrote the award-winning 2004 film Omagh, which dealt with the 1998 bombing that caused the deaths of 29 people in Omagh, Co Tyrone.
Hibbert said that his fictionalised screenplay for Five Minutes of Heaven tells ¿the story of two real people who stand up and say it the way it is.¿ He added: ¿It was important to get their full permission and co-operation.
Working separately with both Alistair and Joe on the fictional areas provided a unique way of telling this story and revealed there were no easy answers.¿
Liam Neeson said it was ¿a wee bit nerve-wracking¿ for him to see the film for the first time at its world
premiere in Sundance last week. ¿You work on something for quite a long period and then you see it and there¿s stuff you can¿t change. And you¿re seeing it with a roomful of strangers too. It¿s a kind of very odd, unique feeling.¿
The Sundance festival gave its Grand Jury Prize to the US entry Push, directed by Lee Daniels. It deals with an obese, under-educated black teenager who suffers horrific abuse from her parents and struggles to rebuild her life.
The micro-budget romantic Irish musical Once first gained international recognition when it won the audience award at the Sundance festival two years ago. It went on make $10 million at the US box-office and to receive a slew of awards, including an Oscar for best original song in February 2008.