Traveller
[1982 / 80 mins / Colour / 16mm / 4:3 format]
Following a marriage arranged by their fathers, young Travellers Angela Devine (Judy Donovan) and Michael Connors (Davy Spillane) are sent to The North of Ireland to smuggle electrical goods back into the south. As they journey through rain-swept border towns, the relationship becomes increasingly strained. They give a lift to IRA renegade, Clicky (Alan Devlin), establishing an uneasy bond between the three. Picking up the goods and returning south, Michael, irritated by Angela, crashes the van. In one of the film’s most inventive scenes, Angela intimates to Clicky, in voiceover flashback, why she was sent to an orphanage. Without transport or money, Michael robs a local post office, forcing them into hiding from the law, before confronting Angela’s father, the incestuous Devine. An Irish road movie, Traveller takes the genre in a different, specifically-Irish direction, upending narrative expectations. Comerford used mostly non-professional actors from the Traveller community, adjusting the script to incorporate changes suggested by the daily lives of the actors. It was, the director states, ’a mixture of the planned and the spontaneous.’ Comerford’s earlier theme, the foggy relationship between Ireland’s historic struggles and the realities of the present, are neatly woven into the dense textures of Traveller. It’s his most poetic, yet demanding work.
[eugene finn]
“This to my mind is what cinema is ultimately about”
— Sunday Independent
“Great film - little dialogue - great shots - lots of traditional music. A raw realistic interesting film, you can almost feel the damp, with no Hollywood sentimentality.”
— IMDb
