Featuring screenings of Down the Corner, Withdrawal, Traveller, Waterbag, High Boot Benny, RoadSide, Reefer and the Model and Emtigon as well as Joe Comerford in conversation event at the IFI this May.

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.

The Irish Film Institute is delighted to present 8 films directed by Joe Comerford as a special focus on his work, this May. These will include 4 feature length films and 4 shorts. Starting on 13 May, audiences will have a chance to see two different films back-to-back on each date – one feature length and one short – and hear Joe talk about his work in an in-conversation event to take place at the IFI in Eustace Street on the final day of the series on 20 May.

The season will also feature the premiere screening of a new digital restoration of the 2023 Director’s Cut of Reefer and the Model.

Tickets are on sale now from ifi.ie/Joe-comerford

Eugene Finn writing about Joe’s work for this programme says, 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’.