HAVING won Booker and BAFTA prizes, Roddy Doyle is now in contention for Europe's most prestigious film award, the Palme d'Or, at next month's Cannes Film Festival.
The film of Doyle's third novel, The Van, is one of 22 selected From 370 entries to compete at Cannes, the festival's director, Mr Gilles Jacob, announced in Paris yesterday.
Doyle wrote the screenplay for The Van and produced the film through Deadly Films, a company he set up with Lynda Myles, a producer on the film versions of Doyle's The Commitments and The Snapper.
"I'm delighted The Van is going to Cannes," Roddy Doyle said yesterday. "I'll be going as a writer, not a producer. What I'm looking forward to doing there is getting under an umbrella and watching the world go by." He added he is now at an advanced stage of adapting Liam O'Flaherty's Famine for the screen.
The English director, Stephen Frears, who made The Snapper, directs The Van, and the film stars Colm Meaney, who has featured in all three films of Doyle's novels, and Donal O'Kelly. The original music score is by Eric Clapton.
The films chosen for the Cannes side bar programme, UnCertain Regard, include another Irish film, Somebody's Son, which deals with two women played by Helen Mirren and Fionnuala Flanagan who have sons on the 1981 H Block hunger strike. The Un Certain Regard selection also includes Deborah Warner's 35 minute film of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land starring the Irish actress, Fiona Shaw staged at last year's Dublin Theatre Festival.
Among international movies selected for competition are the latest films from Bernardo Bertolucci, Joel and Ethan Coen (Fargo), Robert Altman (Kansas City), Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies), Chen Kaige (Temptress Moon) David Cronenberg
(Crash) Jaco Van Dormael (The Eighth Day) and Michael Cimino (Sunchaser).
One of the early favourites to win the Palme d'Or is Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty, which features Jeremy Irons, Liv Tyler, Donal McCann and Sinead Cusack.
A number of Irish films are still in the running for Cannes screenings in the important side bar programme, the Director's Fortnight, details of which will be announced shortly.