DOC Discussions: Paul Sng, Director of TISH
Image of Paul Sng by Alicia Bruce
Paul Sng is an Edinurgh-based filmmaker who directed the new documentary fllm, TISH, which was the opening film of 2023 Sheffield DocFest. TISH is a film about work and life of British photographer, Tish Murtha. Below is an excerpt from the interview we did with Paul as part our Sheffield DocFest coverage.
Q:[We’re] here in Sheffield and I'm here with Paul Sng which had the world premiere of TISH, a new documentary about Tish Murtha. Paul, thanks so much for talking to me today and congratulations on your amazing world premiere. It was a fantastic night.
PS: Yeah, thank you. It was quite overwhelming because you make these films and the best way to see them is with an audience and seeing the love in that room for Tish, for Ella, and the people in the pictures, was really wonderful.
Q: I know your films. We met originally on this podcast radio show for your other film Poly-Styrene: I am a Cliche. You have a really distinct perspective on what you choose. I just firstly wanted to ask a very simple question…why did you want to make a film about Tish Murtha specifically?
PS: Well, I'd seen Tish's work online for the first time, and the first image that really captivated me was the ones of Tish's brother jumping out from a scheme onto some mattresses, and I remember doing that in my childhood in the ‘80s in Southeast London, and it's just a great photograph. You've got everybody is looking at this boy jumping off the roof, which is actually Tish's brother Glen, and then you've got one of Tish's other brothers Mark who's holding this dummy and everyone is including Mark is looking at Glen jumping out of the window onto these mattresses except the dummy and the dummy is looking at Tish. I don't know whether that was deliberate or not, but it's just amazing and the more I saw of her work, the more she became an inspiration.
Not only was she a fantastic photographer, she was also a brilliant writer and political, and Ella [Murtha] and I met online and we're friends online and we'd never met in person and we were chatting about something. I'd edited a photography book and was working on another one and Ella had recommended a photographer to me and then I just messaged her and said have you ever thought about doing a documentary about your mum, and she said “I've been approached but it's not something I'd want to do,” and so I said “Well, if you ever change your mind, let's have a chat,” and she said, “well, let's have a chat anyway.” So we had this phone call, and it lasted about two hours and we just really got on, and I think Ella could see that this kind of film that I was interested in making with her would be very collaborative, so we met up in Newcastle, and I think this was around about after the first lockdown so a few years back and we got on well in person.
We then found our producer Jen Corcoran, and Jen is from the Northeast as is Ella, and it was very important to us that in making a film about a working class female photographer from the Northeast that the team that made it was representative of that and, of course, Jen and Ella are, and then we put in a woman called Hollie Galloway as our cinematographer, who's also from the Northeast and working class, and off we went…
For me, I'm interested in stories about people who maybe haven't been recognised enough whether that's in their lifetime or not, and I'm also interested in stories about people who challenge the status quo. Tish certainly did that. I always wanted to make stories about people that are not always, completely unknown, because Tish certainly wasn't completely unknown, but someone who hadn't really received the due that they deserved. And so, yeah, that's how we went. We did a Kickstarter to raise our initial budget, and then we got some funding from Screen Scotland and from the BFI Society Fund, and then BBC came in and commissioned the film too.
So, yeah, it's been a journey…
Digital Poster of the film TISH
Q: Peter Bradshaw [in a Guardian review] said it was “a humane tribute,” and I just feel like the way that you shared her story, [I] was really emotional in the Q&A [at Sheffield DocFest]. It seems like you had a really good rapport, as you said, with Ella. She mentioned something in the Q &A around you guys having a similar background, and how did that dynamic in the relationship grow over time?
PS: Well, yeah, one of the first things that Ella and I spoke about was being only children and having been from single parent families, our mums raising us alone, and being the centre of your mums’ world. Ella says it in the film, it was me and Tish against the world, and with my mum, it was very much like that. And, Tish made sacrifices for Ella, my mum made sacrifices for me, and I think when you have that in common with someone, you've got an initial thing to form a bond around. So, that's what kicked us off.
And then I think, the film Ella often says she said they've only been made by me, you and Jen [Corcoran], and I think that's right because the challenges that you have to overcome when you make any film are considerable and especially making a documentary, the funding for indie feature documentaries in the UK is limited. So I think it's very important that if you have a team that they are very much one committed but two trust each other have one another's backs, and I consider them both friends. It's been a brilliant film to work on, , not only in terms of creatively but also in terms of nourishing me as a person and as a filmmaker.
Q: I think … the way you handled the artwork, from the filmmaking and the editing, was elegant. The editing, your editor, was incredible. So how did you come with the idea on how to approach sharing someone else's art, which is quite beautiful if you just look at it as it, like in a gallery or something like that?
PS: Yeah, we were gifted [with the fact] that Tish has a formidable body of work, despite not receiving the adulation and a claim that she deserved in a lifetime. She did take a lot of photographs, a lot of which have never been seen. So we had those, and we set one rule quite early on, which was that Tish framed those pictures and, , and the composition, everything, that was set in stone. We didn't want to be like, , zooming in on them or making them 3D or anything like that. We wanted them to be as they were.
So for those scenes, I had the idea that we could, rather than it be straight ahead reconstruction, I thought about what we called a memory space. So Jen found a sort of disused Marks and Spencer on Darlington High Street that was available for artists if they had some kind of artistic endeavor or enterprise that would be there. So basically we built a set there and we were very lucky. A guy called Richard Drew, who was, , a fan of Tish's work and is a production designer, he had designed the set for the Ricky Gervais show after life and so he had, , some materials. And so I think he found the original schematics for what was Ella and Tish's home at one point and he basically just designed it and then it was built in this H&M. And I mean Ella came on set and was, I think she had goosebumps just thinking how eerily it looked and the other production designer had Siam Kolvine, she created Tish’s World from nothing from furnishing it to making it look like how Tish’s House would look, then bringing in Shin-Fei Chen who plays Tish's presence gives you that sense of we're watching her work we were seeing her and observing her.
Then Maxine Peake was a natural choice for an narrator because one, she's brilliant, two, her politics and she was already a fan of Tish. When it came to the edit we know we were thinking about How do we actually, , like, what is the balance between seeing Ella in conversation with people who knew Tish, seeing the photographs, what else are the other kind of elements of the story, seeing contact sheets, seeing negatives. And we had, two really brilliant editors, Lindsay Watson and Angela Slaven. And I think for them as well, I mean, Lindsay knows a lot about photography and really some of the ideas that she came up with were about how we present those photographs are really key.
And Ella is, as the custodian of Tish's legacy knows those images better than anyone. And so at some point Ella was able to sort of come in and say, no, put this picture there, know, that one there. And really to be guided by that was really useful because, you might have ideas about where things are going to go, butvElla is a curator in terms of Tish's what nobody in the world knows it better than Ella. And yeah, it was, I mean, edits always, you have moments, I think, where you, well, I do anyway, on every film I've ever worked on, there's a moment where I think we haven't got this we've got a reshoot, and I certainly had a wobble on this film.
And then you take your time a bit more and you realise now we've got this film, we've found it…we've got it.
Q: Like I said, I was emotional in the screening because I just didn't know much about Tish's life and what happened [to her]. I think a lot of people even responded how angry they were. When did Tish become more known? And do you think in some aspect, your film has the impact to bring the story out to more people? And is that just one of the things you wanted to do?
PS: Yeah, I mean, in her lifetime, it wasn't that she was completely unknown because, she very early on had exhibitions. And I think, I suppose before, before she died, she was probably maybe a cult photographer that If you knew about her, you loved her. And it was probably a special group of people that, I always think that are cult films and cult artists and cult musicians that a lot of people might not know about them. The people that do cherish them, and I think that can be sometimes just as important as having mass adulation.
But then after Tish died, Ella has done a brilliant job. She's published three photography books of her mum's work and some of her writing in as well. And there was an exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery in, I think, in 2017. There was a massive exhibition at the time, which was a retrospective on Tish's career. And I think now, though, with the film, hopefully it will, make Tish's work more widely known.
But also, as you were saying, about watching it and feeling angry, I think it would be great if the film is a rallying cry because, , the economic conditions and the societal inequality that Tish was... documenting back in the 70s and 80s, it never really went away. I mean, I think it might have maybe diminished a bit at some moments, maybe in between 1997 and 2010 perhaps, but then certainly the situation that we're in now, where you've got 4 .3 million children living in poverty in the UK, many of them, probably the majority of them in the north of England, it's still there and these communities that were under the conservative government, marginalised and underserved, that continued under new labour, they did a lot of good things of course, but they didn't fix society, and with those two massive majorities, I still think they could have done a lot more. So in the present day, the things, I suppose Tish's work has a circularity to it that 40 years on, the things that she was writing about and the things she was concerned about in terms of youth unemployment and the abandonment of young people, it all came to pass.
She didn't predict Brexit because that wasn't on her mind, but certainly what she was warning against was if there's a generation of people who are ignored, marginalised and given these opportunities that weren't really good for anything other than just cooking the books on employment statistics, then there would be repercussions, and she warns of these reactionary and barbaric forces in our society and describes it as violence on a grand scale. But I think looking at how prescient she was and how prescient the themes of her work still are today, I think it's going to resonate.
TISH played as part of Sheffield DocFest 2023 but will have a general release with Modern Film later in 2023. For more information visit Modern Film website here.
This interview was carried out by Amanda Rogers. The interview was conducted in person in Sheffield and has been edited and condensed and also is featured as part of the Cinetopia Radio Show and Podcast. Check out the full audio version of the interview below.
