Pinny Grylls aka Rustless Zither
Pinny Grylls is an award-winning HOH/deaf director and editor living in Hackney East London
In 2002 Pinny 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.
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 level 1 BSL Sign Language. 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.
Sam Crane aka Rustic Mascara
Sam Crane aka Rustic Mascara is an award-winning machinima video artist and actor.
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.
