Traveller

Reluctantly-married young Irish travellers Michael and Angela head north of the border at the behest of Angela’s father, to smuggle electrical equipment back to resell. Joining up with IRA man Clicky on the way, the ill-matched couple embark on an uneasy journey marked by blood and murder.

_Traveller _follows an arranged marriage of fire and fisticuffs, with cross-border criminality for a honeymoon and emotional inarticulateness as a dowry, all in the shadow of past abuse and present Troubles. Despite familiar themes of familial violence, estrangement, and exile, Comerford produces a distinctly cinematic, Irish reelism, with voiceover and flashbacks, while moving towards the allegorical realism of his later work. To do so, he worked closely, as in _Down the Corner_, with a screenwriter (Neil Jordan), a marginalized community (Irish Travellers), important Irish cineastes (O’Sullivan and Black), and non-professional actors, particularly quiet-man/musician Davy Spillane and dubbed/bird-in-a-cage Traveller Jody Donovan.