Joe Comerford
Directing
- Born
- December 12, 1947 (age 78) · Dublin, Ireland
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.
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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
Behind the camera11
- 2008Roadside Director, Writer, Editor
- 1993High Boot Benny Executive Producer, Screenplay, Director
- 1988Reefer and the Model Writer, Director
- 1984Waterbag Writer, Producer, Director, Editor
- 1984Atlantean Camera Operator
- 1981Traveller Director
- 1977Down the Corner Editor, Director
- 1976Self Portrait with Red Car Cinematography
- 1975Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire Director of Photography
- 1973
