Grand Theft Hamlet

PINNY GRYLLS
CO-DIRECTOR
After founding Birds Eye View Film Festival, Grylls became an award-winning documentary and
commercials director. Her first short documentary, Peter And Ben, won awards at Aspen, London
Short Film Festival, and SXSW. Since then she has specialized in making documentaries about
theatre, opera and dance. Films include The Hour (National Theatre/BBC), Becoming Zerlina
(The Royal Opera House), Who Do You Think You Were (Channel 4), Voytek The Soldier Bear
(BBC), Thankyou Women (The Guardian), and Skin Hunger (Arts Council/ Dante or Die). She was
a contributing filmmaker to Grierson-nominated The Street bought by Amazon and is currently
developing her first fiction feature Hear My Voice with BFI funding. Commercials include Dove,
Aldi ‘Like series’ and British Gas. Grand Theft Hamlet will be her debut documentary feature.
Pinny studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Oxford University and has worked for over a
decade as a senior ethnographic researcher for Ipsos Mori and the UK government through
Policy Lab. She was also an Associate Lecturer in ethnographic filmmaking in the Anthropology
department at University College London. Other teaching work includes the Poplar Film
School, Central Film School, University of the Creative Arts London, Creative Futures, and Here
On Earth – an International collaborative environmental documentary project made online in
lock down by teenagers in Taiwan, London and New York. She is a proud member of the hard of
hearing/deaf community and is learning British Sign Language.

SAM CRANE
CO-DIRECTOR
Crane is an award-winning machinima video artist and actor. He is currently playing Harry Potter
in the West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and can soon be seen as
Jacques-Louis David in Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film Napoleon for Sony Pictures and Apple
TV. In a theatre career spanning 20 years, he has been critically acclaimed for his performances
at the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, in the West End and on Broadway. He starred as
Farinelli in Farinelli And The King alongside Mark Rylance, and Winston Smith in Robert Icke’s
multi-award-winning 1984.
His machinima film We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On won the Critics’ Choice award
at Milan Machinima Festival, First Prize for Video Art at The Athens Digital Arts Festival, was
shortlisted for the Lumen Prize and long-listed for the Aesthetica Art Prize.
He is a PhD candidate at York University's School of Arts and Creative Technologies and a
member of the PEERS programme of artistic researchers at Zurich University of the Arts. He
read Classics as an Undergraduate at Oxford University and trained as an actor at LAMDA
where he won the Nicholas Hytner scholarship.