Volta™ – Irish Independent Film Online

After a period working as a cameraman with RTE, Black made his first short film Wheels in 1976, adapting a story by writer John McGahern. In 1981, Black merged fiction and documentary in Our Boys an early, and far-seeing, film about the abuse of boys in industrial schools. The film was banned by RTE, who had part-financed it, until a decade later.

In 1984 Black made his first feature-length film Pigs, about an unemployed gay man living in a squat in a dilapidated Dublin tenement. A series of equally marginalized characters arrive to live in the building as tensions mount between the residents, social workers and the Gardai.

Black’s next film Korea, also based on a short story by John McGahern, was released in 1994. Set in county Cavan in the 1950s, the film sees a farmer’s son fall in love with the daughter of a man his father despises, since their families took opposing sides in the Irish Civil War thirty years before. Meanwhile, the body of a young Irish soldier, killed in Korea while serving with the American army, brought back to the village for burial.

In 2001, Black adapted James Carney’s novel The Playboy and the Yellow Lady for Love & Rage. Greta Scacchi and Daniel Craig starred as an English aristocrat and an Irish farmhand who embark on a torrid affair on Achill Island at the dawn of the last century.

More recently, Black’s has made a series of highly personal documentaries; including 2002s The Invisible World, about spiritual healer Tony Hogan and 2007s Learning Gravity, a profile of Irish-American undertaker and poet Thomas Lynch.