Actor Stephen Rea has declared that new Irish the film Black 47, which stars the 71-year old actor, is "the kind of film we need to be making."
"There’s never been a film about the Famine before and this is a very original take," he told The Observer newspaper in an interview conducted in Dublin.
"It’s definitely struck a chord here," he added. "The other day, a woman came up to me in a supermarket and said: ‘I just want to tell you, I loved your movie, and my husband says it should be shown in every school.’ Now, that sort of thing means a lot more to me than any highbrow reviews."
The actor also discussed his ambitious plans for the year 2020, which marks the 40th anniversary of Field Day, the theatre and publishing company he set up with the writers Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Seamus Deane.
He promises "a different kind of literary festival" for Derry in two years time.
"It will be people from troubled areas - Palestinian activists, black American activists, Egyptian activists," he said.
"We need to look at these other struggles in terms of what is happening here, where everything here seems to be going backwards.
"I don’t think it is the time to do a dignified play like Friel’s Translations. We need to hear voices speaking directly of their experience. And we will learn from that, north and south."
The actor said that he has asked a particularly gifted girl to read at the event. "She’s a poet and an asylum-seeker. I want to highlight the disgusting way we treat asylum-seekers here. We are locking up poets. It makes me sick.
"We are the land of poets, we produce posters of our writers and poets for tourists, but we’re locking up poets because they are the wrong colour."
Watch RTÉ Entertainment's interview with the stars of Black 47 here
