If a film managed to get completed in the late nineteen sixties Ireland the next question was how to show it.

Emtigon (1970), made its debut in an underground art gallery. It was about an elderly man living in a city hostel and his intrusion into the life of a woman social worker who cycles through his terrain in the course of her daily work.

I followed this with the half-hour film, Withdrawal (1973), which was situated in a Dublin psychiatric hospital. The film focused primarily on a heroin addict who was between hospital lockup and rejection from his home life. The underlying theme was the different ways in which people withdraw from pain. At an advanced stage in pre-production, legal difficulties prevented the intended inclusion of patients as actors. The experience of making Withdrawal led to a temporary distancing on my behalf from personal film work.

Up to this point I had done the camerawork on my own films. This led to me doing work for other filmmakers who were also getting started. Bob Quinn had established Cine Gael in the Connemara Gaeltacht. It was the period that some now refer to as the ‘First Wave’. An outcome from this valuable experience was to achieve the means to overcome a major hurdle of the time which was access to camera and sound equipment.

The same equipment used in the Cine Gael productions was used in the making of Down the Corner (1977). It was about a gang of young teenage boys and their families in the then ‘trouble zone’ of outer Dublin, Ballyfermot. The approximately one-hour film was based on a local booklet about a raid by the boys on an orchard in a neighbouring territory.

For me, content-wise, it was deliberately not a personal nor an experimental film, but it turned out to be intensely personal in the making. A feature of its cinema run was the number of times people from Ballyfermot came back to the city centre and laughed (or cried) at seeing themselves up on the big screen.

This was followed by what became the semi-experimental Traveller (1982). Its production was delayed because financial support had to be found that would allow the storytelling form to emerge rather than be imposed. It centred on the arranged marriage of a young Traveller couple who were sent to smuggle goods from The North of Ireland into the south and a man they meet who wants to become a Traveller to escape his political past. Traveller was distributed in Ireland and internationally but its first screening was in a Galway theatre. Each night the audience attended a short play, and after the interval the film Traveller.

I received support for my next project, a feature, Reefer and the Model, but the production was delayed by at least a year when a financial backer pulled out on seeing my experimental short, Waterbag, in 1984. Waterbag was set on a trawler, which is what it had in common with the forthcoming Reefer. In it a woman miscarries below deck while the two crewmen are immersed in their own separate stories. The film mixes a live action storyline with an abstracted visual version of the same story.

Reefer was eventually completed in 1988. It was based on my script about a ‘family’ of three men and a pregnant woman who try to work a fishing trawler off the west coast of Ireland. They are together from necessity, rather than choice, and their future depends on evading the past. The production of Reefer led to my thirty-six hours in Hollywood, an experience I would never want to repeat (although I do admire those who can survive it).

The 1993 feature film, High Boot Benny, was particularly personal to me. It was shot near The North of Ireland border in County Donegal. High Boot Benny started as the story of a small boarding school my father attended which was eventually closed through the intervention of the Catholic church and the new Irish state. The film became an allegorical tale about Ireland, north and south, and its ‘conflicted’ history with Britain. In it each of the three main characters is living a deception which ultimately raises the question: ‘On which side are you neutral?’

My short film RoadSide (2008) is about a man and a woman who meet on parallel self-destruct journeys and involves a graphic depiction of a prison suicide. Later, in 2012, it showed at the centre of a large installation which on entry immersed the viewer in a prison-like environment. It exhibited at the Galway Arts Festival as The RoadSide Film Sculpture.

My overall film journey has been a circular sweep through time and forms of filmmaking. What is next intended to emerge from this erratic process does have an advanced working title, but that is a story for another day.

Joe Comerford | 2023