Now he is trying on a new hat. Meet Muammar al-Gaddafi: screenwriter.

A series of sketches he has written evoking his country on the eve of invasion by Italy in September 1911 and then as it roused itself to expel the foreigners, is to become the basis for a film costing at least $40m which begins shooting in Libya next year.

Dhulm . . . Years of Torment will tell the story of Libya's traumatic experience at the hands of Italy. The Libyans became the first people in the world to know the terror of air bombing, among the first to be gassed from the skies, and were early guinea pigs for the concentration-camp concept.

Unable to break their spirit, Italy resorted to driving them across the border into Egypt and Chad.

Ramzi Rassi, the Lebanese producer of the film, says that by the time the Italians fled in 1943, a third of the Libyan population had been killed and a third forced into exile.

Dhulm ("injustice" in Arabic), will tell the story of the invasion and the long Libyan resistance through the eyes of those who experienced it.

One of the main characters is an extraordinary journalist called Francis McCullagh from Dungannon in Co Tyrone, who deserves a biopic all to himself. In October 1911, he crossed the Mediterranean with the invading Italians.

"He came over with the invasion force, " says Rassi, "and later wrote a book about the invasion almost in the form of a script. He is one of the characters in the film, as an eye-witness of what happened."

Dhulm is not Gaddafi's first venture into film. In 1980 his regime paid $30m to make Omar Mukhtar: Lion of the Desert, an epic about Omar the Bedouin schoolteacher who became the legendary leader of the Libyan resistance, and fought on well into his 70s until he was captured by the Italians and hanged in front of 20,000 of his Bedouin followers. Lion had a glittering cast, including Anthony Quinn, Oliver Reed and Rod Steiger. But Arabs were deeply unpopular at the time of its release in 1983 thanks to Opec's price rises and other factors (including Gaddafi himself), and the film sank without trace. Is the world readier now to hear Libya's tale of woe? Rassi says it should be.

"We see Armenians and Jews talking about genocide . . . Libya wants the truth about what happened there to be exposed, too, says Rassi. "It was one of the ugliest forms of colonialism, with a scale of brutality that is unimaginable. Yet very little is known about it."