About

Connor Clements is a writer and director from Northern Ireland.

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.

His MA film, James (2008), follows a fifteen-year-old who decides to tell his teacher the secret he has kept from everyone else. 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 selected for the Short Film Corner at Cannes. In January 2009 it screened at the Sundance Film Festival, which also chose it as one of the ten shorts in Sundance 10/10, free to download from iTunes during the festival. Over the next two years it played festivals across Europe and North America and won 23 awards, among them the Skillset Best UK Short award at the Iris Prize Festival in Cardiff and the Jury Award for Best Student Short at Palm Springs International ShortFest.

He went on to work 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. In 2011 he edited Ribbons, a short film made with twelve lone parents for Gingerbread NI.

Since 2014 he has taught film and television production at South Eastern Regional College’s Film and Television School, taking students’ productions from the first idea to delivery. In 2018 and 2019 he also coordinated the film school at DFK Performing Arts Academy.

His work is character-driven and drawn to complicated relationships: secrecy and identity, desire, and feelings that never quite resolve. He looks to British and European cinema, where much of a story is carried by the frame.

He is now developing his first feature, The Part We Played, a psychological romance inspired by personal experience in Northern Ireland in 2005 and 2006. He began developing it before he wrote James.