Irish Film Institute -International Film Directory – Film Listing

Roadside

    • Director

      Joe Comerford

    • Credits

      Producer: Joe Comerford. Writer: Joe Comerford

    • Principal Cast

      Joe Savino

  • Category

    Short
    Experimental

RoadSide, Comerford’s first digital short, is a veritable assault on its audience – an audacious blur of ugliness and beauty. Mixing found footage from personal archives and his own unfinished short, Rough Touch, it outlines the brief encounter between a man on parole driving a stolen car back to prison and a woman hitchhiker. This simple action provides the narrative core while sensuous visual and sound abstractions replicate the man’s subjectivity. An unsettling prison-cell hanging scene brackets the film, unbalancing the viewer, and underscoring unpleasant undertones of self-destruction, non-communication, the faltering of memory and its effect on history.

Following test screenings, Comerford developed the project into an installation, The RoadSide Film Sculpture (2012). He describes this new form of film exhibition as “entering a space that does not exist, to see a work that is extreme cinema…an attempt to suspend pain, within beauty.”

Notes by Eugene Finn.

12 minutes, Ireland, 2003, Colour

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