BERLIN (AFP) - Britain's Clive Owen plays an MI5 officer trying to protect an informant who is spying on her own IRA family in "Shadow Dancer", a taut thriller that premiered Sunday at the Berlin film festival.
Directed by Oscar-winning film-maker James Marsh and written by Tom Bradby, a journalist who covered the long-running "troubles" in Northern Ireland, the film revives the terror and paranoia of the era's sectarian violence.
"I think that if you're brought up in England and you're my age, it was something that was kind of on the news every day, the troubles in Ireland, and you kind of lived with it," said Owen, 47. "I remember going to Belfast for a while during the troubles. You forget how recently it was a rough place, it was a war zone really."
Owen's MI5 officer Mac interrogates single mother Collette, a Republican living in Belfast with her mother and IRA militant brothers, when she is captured for her part in an aborted bomb plot on the London Tube.
He presents her with a choice: go to prison or inform on her own family. She agrees to spy for the British but when a secret IRA operation goes awry, suspicion falls on her and she fears for her life.
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