Festival opening with a film "Grand Theft Hamlet"

On Wednesday, April 23 at 18:00 a documentary "Grand Theft Hamlet" by British director Sam Crane, Pinny Grylls, shot entirely in the Grand Theft Auto Online virtual game, will open the 12th Riga Pasaules Film Festival.

This year's programme will consist of documentaries that engage with play as an approach to filmmaking and as a theme of inquiry. Stories that capture the ways in which life is constituted through play. Ideas that approach the creative process as simultaneously ludic and serious, real and fantastic, individual and collective, pleasurable and productive, structured and free. Performative aspects of play, where players wilfully engage with each other through pre-established conventions in the process of constructing a project for their future.

The events of the festival opening film "Grand Theft Hamlet"  begin in January, 2021. The UK has just entered its third lockdown and all theatres remain closed. For actors Sam and Mark, 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.

They steal cars and shoot strangers, but also find moments of calm reflection walking through meadows of wildflowers. 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 isn’t Hamlet, a play about revenge the perfect choice for this place?

By using the in-game phone camera filmmakers 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.

Winner of the award for Best Debut Director at British Independent Film Festival and Grand Jury Award at SXSW, Grand Theft Hamlet finds community and creativity in the unlikeliest of places.

Book a ticket online or at the cinema Kino Bize. Trailer can be watched here.

The films will be screened with subtitles in Latvian and English. RPFF is organised by Kino Bize in collaboration with the Latvian Association of Anthropologists. Supported by the Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, National Film Centre and the Creative Europe MEDIA Office in Latvia.

Published: 28.03.2025.