Joe Comerford
Directing
Biography
Joe Comerford was born in 1947 in Dublin, Ireland, graduating from the National College of Art and Design in the 1960s. In the 1970s, he began working for RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, where he learned camera operating and general studio production. Two years later, he left RTÉ to make independent films. All his films share a general concern for those on the margins of what was an increasingly-affluent Irish society. His films of the 1970s and 1980s featured dysfunctional familial settings, as analogous to Ireland's political and religious conditions at the time. His early films have been described as challenging to watch, as they often do not follow a linear narrative, but move forward as a series of vignettes. Comerford has worked as an independent director in Ireland for over 50 years producing work that is distinguished by its cinematic subversion and social commentary, with a trademark twinning of film narrative and visual-aural abstraction. His films focus on socially-marginalised characters –destitute men, drug users, aimless youths, Travellers, prisoners and women in the midst of crisis pregnancies. His two cinema features Reefer and the Model (1988), a comedy-crime thriller and High Boot Benny (1993), a drama set against the backdrop of the Troubles, are both shot through with his distinctive political and social analysis. Alternating between feature films with a narrative bias, and shorts which tend towards abstract painted imagery, Comerford has declared that his longer-term objective is to tell a story by combining the two strands into a ‘painted feature’.
Known For
A police informant is found dead in a boarding-school situated near the border between Ulster and Eire. There are three suspects: the protestant school headmistress; Marley, an unfrocked missionary priest; and Benny, a seventeen-year-old criminal who has taken sanctuary in the school...
High Boot Benny
Comerford’s signature sharp realism infuses this drama about Reefer, an ex-IRA man who picks up hitch-hiker Teresa, a pregnant woman trying to overcome a drug addiction. They head to the trawler where he lives with friends Spider and Badger, that operates between Galway and the Aran Islands. The makeshift family are forced to turn to crime to make a living.
Reefer and the Model
Reluctantly-married young Irish travellers Michael and Angela head north of the border at the behest of Angela’s father, to smuggle electrical equipment back to resell. Joining up with IRA man Clicky on the way, the ill-matched couple embark on an uneasy journey marked by blood and murder.
Traveller
Comerford's first digital short which evolved into an installation, is an audacious blur of ugliness and beauty. Drawing on found footage from personal archives, it outlines an encounter between a man and a woman in a stolen car.
Roadside
Documentary about the Irish, dispelling the myth that they are all of pure Celtic heritage, but showing them as the mix of races they really are, and portraying the island not as the remote outpost of Europe most people think it is, but as a busy meeting place for seafaring traders of the Atlantic all through history.
Atlantean
Cinegael is an independent cinema set up by filmmaker Bob Quinn in the 1970's, in which his son, the director Robert Quinn, lived as a child. The film focuses on the contribution the cinema made to the cultural life of the community, but also to the Irish film industry itself, acting as a home for, and catalyst to, radical ideas and attitudes within the film industry at the time.
Cinegael Paradiso
Based on the writings of David Chapman and Jimmy Brennan, Withdrawal is about Jimmy, a heroin user in a Dublin psychiatric hospital. His thoughts and observations dominate, his subjective voice-over speculating on the lives of his companions. Jimmy leaves the hospital, returning to the city to reconcile with his loved ones, but his withdrawal leads ultimately to a dead end.
Withdrawal
A precursor to Reefer and the Model, Waterbag involves the relationship between two fishermen and a pregnant woman, and ends with an apparently self-induced miscarriage.
Waterbag
In this pitch-black vaudeville of impotence and aggression, Emtigon tragicomically details a homeless old man's covert intrusion into the life of a young female social worker.
Emtigon
A group of unruly Irish stage actors refuse the orders of their British director as he orchestrates a dramatic retelling of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s eighteenth-century keen about the the life and death of Irish rebel Art Ó Laoghaire.
Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire
A group of Ballyfermot schoolboys attempt to rob an orchard in the more affluent, nearby suburb of Chapelizod.
Down the Corner
An artist attempts to draw but has difficulty reconciling what he sees with what he hears.