About

Connor Clements is a writer and director from Northern Ireland. His short film James (2008) was an Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009 and won 23 festival awards. His first feature, The Part We Played, is in development.

James, made for his MA at Queen’s University Belfast, follows a boy growing up in a family that keeps its secrets. It premiered at the Belfast Film Festival in April 2008, where it won the Skillset Award for Best Northern Irish Film, and that May it was the only Northern Irish film in the Short Film Corner at Cannes. At Sundance it screened in Shorts Program IV and was one of the ten shorts in Sundance 10/10, free to download from iTunes during the festival. Its other awards include the Skillset Best UK Short at the Iris Prize Festival in Cardiff and the Jury Award for Best Student Short at Palm Springs International ShortFest.

His films are character-driven and intimate. He is drawn to secrecy and identity, to desire, and to relationships that are hard to see clearly from inside. Before shooting James he wrote that he wanted it to be naturalistic in its look and formal in its style, with the story deciding the shots, and he planned it scene by scene in hand-drawn storyboards.

He studied film at Queen’s University Belfast, taking a BA in Film Studies in 2005 and an MA in Film and Visual Studies in 2007, and took a diploma in filmmaking at the New York Film Academy in 2003. As a student he worked as a trainee on Crossing, a co-production between the Northern Ireland Film and Television Commission and RTÉ, and on Jelly Baby and End Game.

After James he worked in documentary with the director Desmond Bell. He was assistant editor and production manager on the Irish-language feature Child of the Dead End (2009). On The Enigma of Frank Ryan (2012) he was an additional director and assistant editor to Nigel Galt, the editor of Eyes Wide Shut, and he edited the film’s television versions for TG4 and its Irish-language cinema version.

Since 2014 he has also taught film and television production at South Eastern Regional College, taking students’ productions from the first idea to delivery.

The Part We Played, a feature drama set in Northern Ireland and Italy in the early 2000s, is inspired by personal experience. He began developing it before he wrote James. The screenplay is complete, and he is seeking an experienced producer.