Feature film
Traveller
Joe Comerford · 1981
Synopsis
Angela and Michael, two young Travellers, are married against their will by their families and sent north, from County Limerick to Strabane, to buy electrical appliances which they will smuggle. They get on badly; on the road they pick up a hitchhiker, Clicky, a taciturn republican activist, and then an accident destroys their load.
Context
Produced by Margaret Williams for the British Film Institute, the film was shot in early 1980 in the west of Ireland, on sixteen millimetre, for some eighty thousand pounds. The screenplay is Neil Jordan's first, who would say he admired it while judging that it was no longer his; the photography and camera assistance fall to two other filmmakers of the same generation, Thaddeus O'Sullivan and Cathal Black. Judy Donovan, herself a Traveller, acts for the first time, alongside the musician Davy Spillane. The film was presented at the Cork festival on 25 September 1981, then at the Berlin Forum.
Who it is for
An eighty-minute film, in English, slow in pace, that mixes the prepared and the improvised.
Prizes and reception
A work of the first wave of Irish independent cinema; according to its author, the Travellers of Gort were its only real audience.