The Act of Separation

Caoimhin Gaughan Coffey, (born 1997) is a young filmmaker from the west of Ireland. At the age of three he insisted on being left alone in a cinema auditorium during the opening sequence of Disney’s Dinosaur while his mother brought his neighbour to the bathroom.
His subsequent passing obsession with dinosaurs gradually gave way to the realization that it was film itself that had captured him. At the age of twelve, after spending an entire summer shooting, he’d completed his first film, the twenty-five minute long sci-fi epic Tiny Terminator, which later screened at the Galway Junior Film Fleadh.
Caoimhin’s mother and father, an oil-painter and writer respectively, enrolled him in all-Irish speaking schools from kindergarten onwards. Given the embattled and marginalized state of the Gaelic language, a deep sense of cultural obligation grew within him throughout these years. This, coupled with a humanistic, non-religious upbringing, has left him poised perfectly between both old and new forms of Irish society.
From such a background, it is no surprise that Caoimhin is largely concerned with experimentation and the deconstruction of traditional narrative tools in film. He is currently enrolled in the National Film School in Dublin. Creatively, his work is driven by the open questions of expression and identity, and the necessity for self-examination in order to resolve them.