Screened as part of Hackney History Festival.
Stay after the screening for a Q&A with filmmaker Emma-Louise Williams and poet Michael Rosen

Shot entirely on location in Hackney, this film-poem offers a lyrical, painterly defence of the everyday and a celebration of this dynamic and culturally diverse East London borough, even as it poses questions about the process of regeneration.

Rare archive footage and dreamlike sequences of present-day Hackney are juxtaposed with the East London paintings of Leon Kossoff, Jock McFadyen and James MacKinnon and a heightened soundtrack mixes documentary with poetry, music, song and location recordings.

As we slip between past and present, real and imagined, famous and unknown "the world comes to Hackney": From Shakespeare in Shoreditch, to a Jamaican builder, from Anna Sewell's Black Beauty to the Jewish 43 Group taking on Oswald Mosley in Dalston, the audience is invited to apprehend the city as fragmentary and multi-layered, past in the present, present in the past.

Under the Cranes premiered at the East End Film Festival in 2011.

"A joyous wonder, an instant addition to the modern canon of filmic London." - Sukhdev Sandhu, BFI
“A wonderfully life-affirming film-poem" - Paul Farley
“ A marvellous evocation of Hackney – the place, the peoples and their dreams too." - Patrick Wright
"Extends the tradition of the ‘city symphony’' - Ian Christie