One of the striking features of the new century is that three major UK films to date (June 2009) are identical in two ways. All three are biopics and all are dèbut features by visual artists who have come from outside cinema. They are Douglas Gordon's Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait (2006), Anton Corbijn's Control (2007) and Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008). Gordon is a famous Scottish installation artist, Corbijn a highly regarded photographer and director of music videos, and McQueen a Turner Prize-winning video artist (Gordon and McQueen are also ardent cinephiles). A third element is common to all three films: they combine a British dimension with a non-British dimension. Zidane is about a famous French footballer and co-directed by Gordon with Frenchman Philippe Parreno, while photographer Corbijn is Dutch not British, and Hunger, co-written by Irish playwright Enda Walsh, is set and shot with Irish cast and crew in Northern Ireland. This duality is partly because film, especially in Europe, can move easily across national borders but also because, generically speaking, outstanding British cinema has always been enhanced by crucial elements of ‘non-Britishness’, and many would argue, anyway, that Hunger is, apart from its director, a completely Irish film.