It’s January 2021. The United Kingdom has just entered its 3rd lockdown and all 
theatres remain closed. For actors Sam Crane 
and Mark Osterveen, the future looks bleak. As the pandemic drags on Mark who lives alone is increasingly socially isolated, while Sam is panicking about how he is going to support his family. They channel their midlife frustrations by immersing their avatars 
in the horrifically violent yet beautifully rendered virtual world of Grand Theft Auto Online. In one gaming session they stumble across a theatre and have an idea. Why not stage Hamlet inside the game? Well, there are several reasons why not, chiefly that most people in the game are intent on ruthless annihilation, not polite appreciation of a theatrical production. But wasn’t theatre just as dangerous 
and rowdy a business in Shakespeare’s time, and isn’t Hamlet, a play about revenge the perfect choice for this place? GRAND THEFT HAMLET is shot entirely inside the world of Grand Theft Auto. By using the in-game phone camera we were able to get intimate close ups 
and cinematic pans across landscapes – enabling a more cinematic visual language and moments of pathos, emotion and lyricism to exist within the chaos and violence of this undiscovered country. Co-directors Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls join us for a conversation on the arc of their own journey into this virtual world, casting on-line netizens to play these iconic characters, how they came to grasp and utilize the boundless potential of this space, the genuinely funny travails of “rehearsing” the actors and so much more regarding this exceptionally successful debut feature “documentary”.
For more go to: undiscoveredcountryfilm.com
For more go to: grandthefthamlet.com
SXSW – Grand Jury Prize winner – Documentary Feature
BIFA – Maverick Award & Best Debut Director – Documentary Feature
Sitges International Film Festival – Best Documentary
Vancouver International Film Festival – Audience Award
DMZ International Film Fest – Frontier Competition – Grand Prize
About the filmmaker – In 2002 Pinny Grylls co-founded Bird’s Eye View Film Festival to promote female directors in the industry. Her first short documentary ‘Peter and Ben’ won awards at festivals, including, Aspen, IDFA, LSFF, and SXSW and toured festivals internationally. Grand Theft Hamlet is her first feature documentary and is co-directed with her life-partner actor and video artist Sam Crane. In 2024 she won the Chanel BFI Filmmaker Award for Creative Audacity. Pinny has a special interest in documentaries about theatre and performance. Using her skills for compassionate observation and quirky humour she has directed and edited independent documentaries for BBC, BFI Doc Society, The Guardian, Channel 4 and the National Theatre and The Royal Opera House. Documentaries include ‘The Hour’, ‘Who Do You Think You Were’, ‘Skin Hunger’ and ‘Thank you Women’. Her commercials include British Gas, Aldi and The Dove Real Beauty Campaign. Her films have been collected by the BFI Archive. In 2023 she was awarded BFI Development funding for her first fiction feature film ‘Hear My Voice’, a story about a young Congolese boy who dreams of being an opera singer while trying to reconnect with his estranged father who like Pinny is losing his hearing. It is a comedy and a musical. Pinny is a lipreader, a hearing aid user and is learning BSL Sign Language Level 3. Like many other people with disabilities – she has found gaming a wonderfully accessible and freeing environment in which to have fun and make films. She uses live captioning when she is gaming. For more go to: pinnygrylls.co.uk
About the filmmaker – In a theatre career spanning twenty years, Sam Crane has been critically acclaimed for his performances at the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, in the West End and on Broadway. His films have been screened at contemporary art and film festivals worldwide. He won the Critics’ Choice award at Milan Machinima Festival, First Prize for Video Art at The Athens Digital Arts Festival and was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize and the Lumen Prize. His production of Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto won The Stage Innovation Award 2023 and is the subject of a forthcoming feature length documentary. 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. He is a PhD candidate at York University’s School of Arts and Creative Technologies (under the supervision of Dr Ben Kirman and Dr Karen Quigley) and is 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. He co-directs Grand Theft Hamlet with his wife filmmaker Pinny Grylls. For more go to: rusticmascara.com
SOCIAL MEDIA
instagram.com/grandthefthamlet
instagram.com/mubi
instagram.com/officialmarkoosterveen
instagram.com/joltfilm
instagram.com/samuelrcrane
instagram.com/pinnygrylls
“Grand Theft Hamlet wrings lots of grim laughs out of this material. However, there’s also something unexpectedly relevant about watching Sam and Mark try to craft some unity in a virtual world of guns and debauchery.” – Lisa Laman, Culturess
“Not just one of the most deeply inventive and thoughtful documentaries of the 2020s so far, but it’s an especially moving tribute to Shakespeare’s work, performed by a motley crew of anonymous strangers seeking video game refuge during the pandemic.” – Matt Mitchell, Paste Magazine
‘“Grand Theft Hamlet” is really about a number of other themes: artistic obsession, community, and, I think most important, what constitutes “real” life in a world pervaded by digital existences.” – Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times
“A poignantly hilarious documentary about creating art in a crisis.” – David Ehrlich, INDIEWIRE
“Grand Theft Hamlet captures this wacky and surprisingly moving affair with dry British wit, vulnerable introspection, and a lot of failed attempts at rehearsing a classic play in a video game where the goal is to gun down everyone around you.” – Allegra Frank, The Daily Beast