Irish film-makers earn their stripes

With the tiger population down to about 1,500 in India, an Irish film is helping conservation efforts

SHOOTING TIGERS in India is not an activity at which we Irish would expect to excel, even when the weapon in question is a camera rather than a gun. But A Tiger Called Broken Tail, a striking and unusual film by John Murray and Colin Stafford-Johnson, is about to break into the international TV-wildlife big time. It will be shown in the BBC's prestigious Natural Worldslot on Tuesday evening, and the following week it will air in the US on PBS's award-winning Natureseries.

“These are incredibly competitive slots, both of which take wildlife really seriously,” says Murray.

“It’s good that a small Irish production company has broken through that glass ceiling,” adds Stafford-Johnson. “And it’s not just that they’ve taken the film; it’s that they’re very, very keen on it. So now they’ll talk to us about other ideas too.”

This film, which seems to appeal to everyone who sees it, focuses on Stafford-Johnson’s interest in the eponymous Broken Tail, “the first tiger cub I ever saw”.

Stafford-Johnson was working for the BBC at the time and had been sent to Ranthambore National Park, in India, to make a film about a tiger family. “I had found his mother about a year beforehand, and I was following her, waiting for her to meet a male and produce cubs,” he says. “I was there when she met her man at about 10 o’clock on a Christmas morning. And then, three months later, along came Broken Tail. He was just great. He taught me a lot about tigers.”

Broken Tail wasn’t just cute. He was, as PBS puts it, “adventurous, exuberant, fearless, and clearly destined to be an important tiger in Ranthambore”. Stafford-Johnson and his crew filmed him regularly until he was about two and a half years old. Then, one day, he vanished.

The idea for a follow-up film was a good one: go back to India and find out what had happened to this extraordinary animal. Add Stafford-Johnson's experience of shooting big cats – "tigers have been my bread and butter for the past 12 years" – and Murray's record in producing beautifully photographed documentaries about the polar regions and Earth's indigenous peoples and you might think you'd have a surefire success. Funding proved hard to get, however. If it hadn't been for the Irish Film Board and RTÉ, both of which were, according to Murray, instrumental in financing the film, A Tiger Called Broken Tailmight never have happened.

It is among the most successful Irish wildlife films ever produced. More importantly, says Stafford-Johnson, it's making a contribution to tiger conservation. " Broken Tailhas potentially done an awful lot to change the way we look at tigers and the way we look at those island reserves in India," he says. "There are very few tigers left, and many of them are in these isolated reserve areas.

“Imagine having just 1,500 people left in Ireland, living in football stadiums around the country but not connected to each other. Most of them are there with close relatives, so they’re not necessarily going to find a future partner that easily. Broken Tail showed that tigers are able to leave these places in search of a mate – and they do.”

The president of the Indian National Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, came to see a version of the film with some of the country’s top politicians. As Stafford-Johnson points out, if tigers are to be saved from extinction it will be Indian policymakers, not foreign film-makers, who save them. But with just 1,500 tigers left in India – an estimate that may be too high – is it too late? “I’ve got to be optimistic,” says Stafford-Johnson. “I’d be too depressed otherwise.”

He is happy, though, about developments closer to home. The new series of Living the Wildlife, which he presents, will air on RTÉ next month. The first programme finds him on the River Dodder in Dublin.

“I saw an otter family, a mother and two cubs, in Ballsbridge,” he says. “In most parts of the country dippers can only have one nest a year; on the Dodder they have two. The river is chock-full of kingfishers. It’s a thriving river right in the heart of the city, because people decided that they were going to look after it. It shows that you can have all the development you want and protect nature at the same time.”

A Tiger Called Broken Tailis on BBC2 at 7pm on Tuesday