‘Queen of Air’ was a poetry film made for large-scale projection for the Amy Johnson Festival in Hull.
The poem was written by poet and Wordlife Director Joe Kriss and the short film was made by BAFTA-nominated filmmaker Annie Watson. Amy Johnson was one of Hull’s most famous daughters, an aviatrix who broke world records in flying times from England to Australia, Cape Town and across the world. The Amy Johnson Festival marked seventy years since her first world record-breaking flight.
Poet Joe Kriss researched Amy Johnson’s life through biographies and copies of letters written to her family and wrote a poem examining Amy’s fearless solo flights around the globe. Filmmaker Annie Watson used this poem to inspire a short film that included some archive footage of Amy, alongside stylised movements from dancers and moths that represented the fragility and frailty of aviation at the time and the bravery with which Amy confronted these risks.
The short film was projected onto iconic locations in Hull such as The Deep, but also onto buildings that held significance for Amy, including The Boulevard Centre which is located on the road that Amy first grew up on.