TRAVELLER

A young Traveller couple Angela (Judy Donovan) and Michael (Davy Spillane) are sent to smuggle goods across the Northern Irish Border, encountering violence and hardship along the way. Using mostly non-professional actors from the Traveller community, adjusting the script to accommodate the demands of the participants’ lives and filming in authentic wintry locations, the film was “a mixture of the planned and the spontaneous”. It is Comerford’s most poetic, yet demanding, work.

80 mins, Ireland-UK, 1982, Digital

WATERBAG

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. Haunting images accompany composer Roger Doyle’s score

7.5 mins, Ireland, 1984, Digital

Notes by Eugene Finn

Screening as part of the Joe Comerford retrospective.