Director: Paul Sng

Following his last picture, the illuminating Polly Styrene documentary ‘Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché’, director Paul Sng profiles another pioneering female artist, once again drawing on the testimony of friends and family. Patricia ‘Tish' Murtha was born in South Shields in 1956. Wanting to record the Elswick community that she grew up in, she took pictures, with a camera that she found, of Newcastle’s West End. These photographs captured the ruinous impact of 80s Thatcherite de-industrialisation of the area and the quotidian life of the people who lived there. On moving to London, Murtha sensitively chronicled the lives of sex workers in Soho. As an insider, her photographs were lauded for their insight and tenderness. Tish’s daughter Ella is our guide as she interviews colleagues, friends and family while taking us through her mother’s career. Sporting a very passable Geordie accent, Maxine Peake, reads from Murtha’s writings. It’s a stirring elegy for a neglected artist as well as a whole way of life, that also makes a passionate case for the need to provide and maintain creative outlets for the less privileged. And the photographs, or course, are wonderful.

David Willoughby

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