Premiere at East End Film Festival 2011

The premiere of Under the Cranes at the Rio Cinema in Dalston on April 30th 2011 was a fantastic day.  Thank you to eveyone who came.  They were queing out the door and the Rio had to open the top part of the cinema to get everyone in!  Good effort.

The poet, Lemn Sissay was there.  He sent us his thoughts on the film and these are some great photos that he took,  Thank you very much, Lemn.

"I cycled from Clapton and wended  through Ridley Market on my way to The Rio.  Ridley Market's not a good idea with a bike in hand. I've only ever been through it once before.  Anyway,  I was looking at some African textile prints and remembering a similar shopping experience in Gambia twenty years ago and then  heard a cockney voice selling tomatoes from another stall  "two paaaaaands the lot".   

For all kinds of questionable reasons these two experiences, the sound and the sight, are  separated in the media - it's untruthful. You over there and you over there.  But the truth was right there on Ridley market  and  it was  shot through the film too and I loved it.  Your film is a rare thing."    

Click on the links for more reviews here:
http://thequietus.com/articles/06208-under-the-cranes-hackney-urban-regeneration-films-east-end-film-festival
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=24813


SCREENINGS:

Saturday December 4th 2010  NFT3 BFI Conference "Reframing Poetry" with Simon Armitage & Michael Rosen

Friday March 18th  2011   HACKNEY PODCAST event, Red Gallery, Shoreditch, EC1

Saturday April 30th   EAST END FILM FESTIVAL 2011,  Rio Cinema, 1.30 pm http://www.eastendfilmfestival.com/index.php?/Programme_2011/C33/#here

Thursday May 12th   "Students, paupers and patients: The many lives of the St Philips Building" 7.30 pm 

St Philips Building, Sheffield Street, WC2A 2EX, London, United Kingdom

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=215820228447314

Friday June 10th   DALSTON EASTERN CURVE GARDEN, 9.00 pm   POSTPONED TILL LATER IN SUMMER

Open-Air event with Open Dalston, entrance to garden by the Hackney Peace Mural at 13 Dalston Lane, London E8

http://opendalston.blogspot.com/2011_04_01_archive.html

http://dalstongarden.site11.com/

Saturday June 25th  RIO CINEMA, Dalston, 2.30 pm 

Special matinee plus shorts with East London setting.  Q & A 

http://www.riocinema.ndirect.co.uk/2011/Jun11/specialcreenings.htm

Sunday July 3rd    MARXISM 2011, central London, 9.00 pm 
https://www.marxismfestival.org.uk/2011/m2011%20timetable%20LR.pdf

Saturday July 9th  LEDBURY POETRY FESTIVAL, Herefordshire

http://www.poetry-festival.com/

Sunday July 17th  FLOATING CINEMA, SHOREDITCH FESTIVAL, 6pm & 7 pm. Q & A 
Waterhouse Restaurant,  Regent's Canal,  Orsman Road,  N1 5QJ 
http://floatingcinema.info/events/128

Tuesday July 19th   HACKNEY SOCIETY at Hackney Museum, London E8  6.15 pm 

http://www.hackneysociety.org/page_id__181_path__.aspx

 Sunday September 25th   APPLEDORE BOOK FESTIVAL, North Devon  11.30 am 

 http://appledorebookfestival.co.uk/

Patrick Wright reviews Under the Cranes

"A marvellous evocation of Hackney - the place, the peoples and their dreams too. It reveals the ruin, disconnection and the frailty of life without giving an inch to literary misanthropy or the voyeuristic perspectives in which East London is exploited for tales of misery, depravity and social failure.   It manages to be elegaic without being merely doleful. The combination of voice and image is very nicely handled, and the archive footage is wonderful. I was glad the film didn't resort to more polemical assaults on the Olympics, legitimate as those may be. I think the film gains a lot by not being too firmly located in that argument, not least the possible realization that we all live 'under the cranes' these days.  A lot of the stories and locations were familiar - is that Town Guide Cabinet really in the Hackney Museum now? - but I never knew about the plastic!"

Patrick Wright (A Journey Through Ruins, On Living in an Old Country)

Paul Farley reviews Under the Cranes

‘Under the Cranes’ is a wonderfully life-affirming film-poem of place, full of lost time and effacements, reefs of street markets and shop fronts, painted in stock-brick yellows, steel shutter greys and silvery monochromes; and full of people, always people, the voices who have passed this way and called this home. As a collage of the city at its most quick, it has the ache and tug of what has been and gone; as a moving study of resourcefulness, resistance and resilience, it collapses time and returns each story to its street.

Paul Farley, Professor of Poetry, Lancaster University, 

(Edgelands, with Michael Symmons Roberts, is published by Jonathan Cape)

Who did what

"..lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration…”

            

Jane Jacobs

  

UNDER THE CRANES

A Film by Emma-Louise Williams

Based on a play for voices

by Michael Rosen

Cinematographer  Conor Connolly

Editor  Hoping Chen

Additional Editing  Enric Junoy

Sound Editor  Linda Brenon

Assistant Director  Walter Stabb

Location Sound Recordist  Ross Adams 

Camera Assistant  Neal Caton

Voices in order of appearance

Michael Rosen 

Richard Earthy

Hamza Mohsin

Sally Armstrong

 Eileen Pollock

Yetunde Oduwole

Nathan Thompson

Janie Booth

 Altan R Koraltan

Cosh Omar

 Ben Bazell

Cyril Nri

Gabby Wong

Joe Shefer

Voice Director  Christopher Preston

Piano  Liam Noble 

Recorded at The Premises Studio Hackney Road, London E2

Studio Engineer  Jason Howes

What the film's about

A meditation on place as 

central to our experience of history 

Using the script of poet Michael Rosen’s documentary play, the film is shot on location in the London Borough of Hackney and intercut with rarely seen archive footage, much of which shows the locality’s commitment to social housing. As we hear from the famous  – Shakespeare in Shoreditch, Anna Sewell, Anna Barbauld – alongside a Jamaican builder, a Bangladeshi  restaurant owner or the Jewish 43 Group taking on Oswald Mosley in Dalston, we see past and present streets, parks, cemeteries and markets.

‘If you let it, a street will grow,’ says a voice as the film shows ‘layers of lives’, offering a lyrical, painterly  defence of the everyday even as it raises questions about the process of ‘regeneration’; and while David Cameron claims that ‘multiculturalism has failed’, this film celebrates how ‘the world comes to Hackney’.

In terms of both the visual and the aural, the film heightens the real:  the soundscape mixes documentary with poetry, music, song and location recordings,  while the picture juxtaposes slow, still shots with paintings by East London artists, Leon Kossoff, Jock McFadyen and James MacKinnon.  Breaking with the linear narrative convention, the audience is invited to apprehend the city as fragmentary and

multi-layered. – “past in the present; present in the past.”  

Hackney Canal - oil on board 

by James MacKinnon 

East End Film Festival

Evening all

I'm delighted to announce that my first film,
Under the Cranes, will be showing at this year's
East End Film Festival 
Saturday 30th April  
1.30pm 
Rio Cinema, Dalston


The film is based on poet Michael Rosen's play for voices Hackney Streets and is the culmination of two years work shooting in Hackney, sifting through local film archive and filming some beautiful paintings by Leon Kossoff, Jock McFadyen and James MacKinnon.

Very many thanks to everyone who has worked on the film in any way. I'll be posting the full cast and crew credits later and details of screenings at Arts festivals in the summer.

The film had a little preview taster as part art installation at Red Gallery, Shoreditch where it was projected with several other films at the Hackney Hear launch event on Friday 18th March. People seemed to be enjoying it.

http://www.eastendfilmfestival.com/

http://www.riocinema.org.uk/

http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/

This is Leon Kossoff talking on Channel 4 News not long after his 80th birthday
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAmBFUp-kUQ

http://www.jockmcfadyen.com/main_pages/intro.htm

http://www.jamesmackinnonfineart.com/index.htm

http://www.hackneyhear.com/