Joe 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’.
