AFTER scooping the prestigious Camera D'Or award at the 2008 Festival, Killarney actor Michael Fassbender stepped back on to the red carpet in Cannes this week for the premiere of his latest blockbuster project, Inglorious Basterds.

Starring beside Hollywood superstars Brad Pitt and Samuel L Jackson, Fassbander was thrilled that the Quentin Tarantino directed movie has been shortlisted for the prestigious 2009 Palme d'Or.

No stranger to the glamour and glitz of Cannes, after the success of Hunger last year, the Killarney star looked perfectly at home at the premiere of the film at the Palais De Festivals during the 62nd International Cannes Festival.

Set in Nazi occupied France and narrated by Samuel L Jackson, the film tells the story of a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" who spread fear through the Third Reich with the brutal killing of Nazis. The group, led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) soon cross paths with a French Jewish teenager working in Paris and the story develops from there.

Fassbender plays Lieutenant Archie Hicox, a British movie buff sent behind enemy lines to sabotage the premiere of a Nazi Propaganda film.

The film received mixed reviews from the notoriously difficult to please Cannes critics but it is guaranteed to go down a storm when it opens in his native Kerry at the end of the summer.