The second Mediterrane Film Festival took place from June 22 to 30, under the patronage of film commissioner Johann Grech and the deep pockets of the Malta Film Commission, which has included the event in its strategy for attracting investments, upskilling and bringing more jobs to the island.

As the festival wrapped at a lavish black-tie closing night at Fort Manoel, where all the glitz and technical wizardry of Malta’s film services were brilliantly on display, Commissioner Grech brightly affirmed the festival would be back next year to celebrate the island’s 100-year film anniversary.

Adding weight to this project was an address by the President of the Republic of Malta, Myriam Spiteri Debono, who underlined the primary importance of promoting the film industry and developing it into one of the pillars of the Maltese economy.

Actually, the Mediterranean-themed event is not the first festival to regale the island’s residents with new films. The pre-Covid years saw a decade of small, audience-friendly fests including the Valletta Film Festival, the Malta Youth Film Festival and the Malta Short Film Festival, which largely (but not exclusively) concentrated on promoting local films and talent. Instead of reviving these initiatives, the film commission chose to invest its not inconsiderable funds – over €3.7 million, according to a public spending report – in a much bigger and more far-reaching event aimed at attracting attention and, eventually, investments.

Judging by the second edition, it certainly has the know-how to get there once some basic teething problems are overcome, mainly by publicizing the film program, which was generally quite strong, and growing the audience. Only the open-air screenings held in St. George’s Square in the historic center of Valletta were full, thanks to a popular film program that included the People’s Choice award winner The Count of Monte Cristo. Perhaps because the main venues were scattered around the sprawling city, the general public was scarce at the indoor cinemas, where screenings were attended mostly by festival guests and journalists.

Working on venues and on increasing audiences is going to be the main challenge going forward. While Cavina reeled in some fine films overlooked by the critics (Brandt Andersen’s intensely emotional The Stranger’s Case, about the refugee crisis caused by endless wars, won the best director and the best acting prize for Yasmine Al Massri), other titles proved too arty and marginal for unprepared viewers. (Journalists present might well include on their future wish list a dedicated transport desk to simplify the task of navigating the far-flung venues.)

Yet the level of hand-picked festival films, some as recent as Cannes, was high. Curated by the experienced Italian programmer Teresa Cavina, Mediterrane showed itself to be a festival that has set its sights high on the international front, The main competition was won by the Turkish film Life (Hayat), an uncompromising rumination by auteur Zeki Demirkubuz on toxic masculinity, ingrained sexism and existential despair. Nabbing second prize was Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown, which raised the bar for Palestinian exile movies with its harsh but empathetic description of being a Palestinian refugee in Greece.

In the Mare Nostrum sidebar, a jury composed of festival directors chose the Indian film Nocturnes by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan as Best Narrative Story. There was even a Virtual Reality section, which British Simone Fougnier won with his Tales from Soda Island.

In addition to the 45 recent films screened, a steady stream of masterclasses, round tables, workshops and panel discussions drew top guests like British director Mike Leigh to the podium. Leigh’s masterclass, affectionately moderated by British Film Commission head Adrian Wootton, attracted a large audience to festival headquarters in the historic Grandmaster’s Palace in Malta’s quaint capital, Valletta. Other guests included production designer Nathan Crowley (Interstellar), casting director Margery Simkin (Erin Brockovich, Star Trek), composer Simon Franglen (Avatar: The Way of Water) and editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis (Poor Things).

Among the celebrities present at the glitzy closing ceremony were Hollywood lights like writer-director Colin Trevorrow, whose connection to Malta goes back to three blockbusters in the Jurassic Park franchise, and actor Heather Graham, as well as British soul singer Heather Small MBE, Britain’s Got Talent’s Calum Scott and Maltese opera singer Joseph Calleja. The event was warmly hosted by British comedian David Walliams, who opened the proceedings before an 800-strong audience on the parade grounds of Fort Manoel by presenting a mid-length film, starring himself as a lost time traveler searching for the festival’s Golden Bee award amid the Knights of St. John. Highlights of the evening were Mike Leigh receiving a Career Achievement Award and celebrated Maltese veteran production coordinator Rita Galea (World War Z) being presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Golden Bee Award to:
LIFE (HAYAT)
dir. Zeki Demirkubuz (Turkey)

Special Jury Award
TO A LAND UNKNOWN
dir. Mahdi Fleifel (Palestine, France)

Best Director
BRANDT ANDERSEN
for THE STRANGERS’ CASE (Jordan)

Best Acting
Yasmine Al Massri
in THE STRANGERS’ CASE

Best Cinematography
CARLOS ALFONSO CORRAL
for THE DAMNED (Italy)

Best Production Design
MYRTE BELTMAN
for SWEET DREAMS (Bosnia and Herzegovina)

Best Screenplay
STEFPHANE BRIZE, MARIE DRUCKER
for OUT OF SEASON (France)

MARE NOSTRUM COMPETITION

Best Narrative Story
Anirban Dutta, Anupama Srinivasan
for NOCTURNES (India)

OUT OF COMPETITION: PEOPLE’S CHOICE AWARD
Alexandre de la Patelliére, Matthieu Delaporte
for THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO (France)

FUTURE VISIONS: BEST VIRTUAL REALITY WORK
Simone Fougnier
for TALES FROM SODA ISLAND (UK)

You have strong family roots in Malta, how often do you come back to visit?

“I used to spend about a month a year in Malta, primarily with family, but also a big group of friends and colleagues and connections that I spend as much time as I can with. Now, less regularly, but I am still really closely attached both emotionally and logistically. There’s a music festival there called Rock The South that I helped to program, that falls in the spring every year. I also helped to set up a record label, Kewn records, and I’m still involved in that. The name translates to sort of… being, being in space and time.”

Your new album Saru l-Qamar is rooted in the Maltese language, are you a fluent speaker?

“I try to keep it at a good level. I speak Maltese at home with my daughter, and that is necessary, without practice it does fade quickly, especially as so much of my day-to-day life is in England. There is not a great well of Maltese language to draw on if you’re in England. And so it is an effort to keep it, to keep it at a good service level, especially as Malta is so so amenable to the English language, it is easy just to slip into English, and stick there and fail to notice. But it’s a really important part of the project. The project wouldn’t have existed without the Maltese language.”

The album grew out of an unusual cultural archiving foundation in Malta, Magna Ziem. How did their work come to shape yours?

“They had this program a few years ago where they offered families free digitisation of their analogue formats in trade for keeping a copy in the archive. So a lot of these families had not heard their relatives voices for decades because they were stored on like, reel to reel tapes, antiquated, outdated formats. And so Magna Ziem’s digitisation process opened a lot of doors to access, free access for people. It is tied in with contemporary cultural explorations as well. They also have exhibitions and talks. And my record is not the first time they’ve worked with musicians. They also work with film-makers, poets, photographers… likewise there are a lot of artists and creatives within the within the foundation itself.”

Living in Britain, do you feel part of a wider Maltese cultural diaspora community?

“Something very common to Malta is, it’s a small place, without a great deal of cultural resources, so you find that Maltese creatives often leave. I have some mates who play in a guitar band called Genn, who are doing fairly well in the UK touring circuit. They made that decision themselves, to get out of Malta, make themselves more available to Europe and the UK. A lot of Maltese friends in England have made similar moves, which I guess you could call a diaspora. But you could also call it a search in pursuit of cultural support, which is difficult to come by in a really small country like Malta. But diaspora is really common thing, and was especially common in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. I don’t know if you’ve spent much time with the political history of Malta, but in that period there was a really contested premiership in power under the Prime Minister, Dominic Mintoff. He was ostensibly a leftist, but an authoritarian. That’s the reason my family left, because he really discouraged and, in a lot of cases, crushed educational pursuits. My dad and his brother were at medical school and were forced out, and so had to move to England”

You have composed short film scores, and occasionally work as a musical supervisor for film-makers. Do you have connections to the Maltese film industry?

“You’re aware of Alex Camilleri and Luzzu, right? Alex is a Maltese film-maker. This actually relates back to the question you asked earlier about cultural diaspora. Alex is a film-maker who was educated in New Jersey, and he has created what I would describe as Malta’s finest film export, a full-length feature named Luzzu. It is named after the traditional fishing blue, yellow and red boats that you’ll see out on the harbours. It’s in the Maltese language as well. Alex is a real talent and has a very bright future in film ahead of him. And I’m really fortunate to be music supervising on his subsequent film, which I don’t think has been announced yet, but I believe it’s a 2026 release.”

How important are events like Mediterrane Film Festival, and the Maltese culture industry in general, in promoting art and artists from Malta?

“It is a really small country without access to a great deal of cultural support or cultural infrastructure. And so sometimes it’s quite difficult for those voices to be heard, especially outside. But I think the quality and the talent is there. enough for it to deserve a platform, but also to be slowly finding its own platform. Because of films like Luzzu, because of really high-grade creative projects, and you could probably include Mediterrane Film Festival in that list as well. It’s an opportunity for non-Maltese to be able to appreciate the environment that has created Maltese culture right now.”

Opening with a few eloquent lines of Shakespeare about refugees who, fleeing hideous violence, seek shelter in a foreign nation, The Strangers’ Case stakes its claim to the highest moral outrage in the current worldwide and, apparently, age-old humanitarian crisis. War leads not only to death but to displacement and millions of desperate souls on the move in search of safety and shelter, and producer-turned-director Brandt Andersen’s aim in his first feature film is to make sure no viewer turns away indifferently from the screen, like they have grown to ignore the TV news.

Winner of the Amnesty International Film Prize in Berlin, where it premiered as a Special Gala, the film has had a slow festival life since its bow, though its appearance in the Mediterrane Film Festival in Malta, the site of almost daily dramas involving immigrants in rickety boats drowning, is a most appropriate venue. Still, the way the film is structured, shot and acted for maximum drama and emotional effect suggests this is a work capable of reaching a much larger and more varied audience. Distributors take note.

Andersen, an artist and activist who based his screenplay on his short film Refugee, turns up the volume from the very first scene and never really bothers to turn it down again. The result is an emotionally draining experience that puts aside the niceties of motivation and nuanced feelings in favor of raw skin and open veins. And it certainly holds the attention.

The film is divided into chapters. “The Doctor” is about Amira, played with heroic immersive realism by Palestinian actress Yasmine Al Massri. She is a radiologist but in the current emergency, as bombs rain down on her hospital, she is one of two surgeons working non-stop in a dusty operating room. When the bullying leader of a band of nationalist soldiers, Mustafa (Yahya Mahayni), realizes she is also treating “the enemy” they are fighting and points his rifle at a bleeding youth, she bravely stares him down. It’s not the most subtle school of filmmaking, but the tension is visceral and the good guys and bad guys clearly defined.

But not so fast: Mustafa has a father who he deems to be a “traitor” because he won’t fight, but secretly he loves the stubborn old man. We watch the battle-hardened soldier melt almost to tears when his father tells him in disgust, “My son is dead.”  This is the chapter entitled “The Soldier”, a fast-moving horror during which a black-clad intelligence officer appears like death itself and orders his men to drag men, women and children out of their homes and summarily execute them as “terrorists”. This story cunningly flows into a high-tension attempt to escape across the border by Amira and her daughter, hidden in the trunk of a car driven by a daring young Captain (Palestinian star Saleh Bakri).

Each chapter ends in a classical cliffhanger where lives lie in the balance. Who lives and who dies is postponed till later, as the characters meet and mingle in a risky dance with death. It is a highly effective narrative device that holds the audience in an iron grip, and Andersen shows over and over again that he knows how to use it.

Part of the secret is that the whole story is heading like a raging torrent to the same place: a rendezvous aboard an overcrowded raft on the Mediterranean, where the surviving characters attempt a desperate flight to Greece. A chapter called “The Smuggler” introduces the big, muscular, ruthless human trafficker Marwan, a schizophrenic role that Omar Sy plays to perfection, balanced between good and evil, between love for his sick son and his greed for money. There is nothing here that hasn’t been dramatized before with more depth and meaning, like the random, last-minute choice of a passenger who is forced, like the young hero of the Italian Oscar-nominated Io, Capitano, to steer the boat across a raging sea.

The surprise arrives when the final character is introduced: the captain of a Greek Coast Guard rescue vessel, whose dedication to his job and to saving the lives of strangers is so unexpected that it offers a wholly new perspective on the long series of dramas that have brought the characters together.

Director, screenplay: Brandt Andersen
Cast: Yasmine Al Massri, Yahya Mahayni, Omar Sy, Ziad Bakri, Constantine Markoulakis, Jason Beghe, Massa Daoud, Carlos Chahine, Ayman Samman, Thanos Tokakis, Fares Helou, Jay Abdo, Mahmoud Bakri, Ward Helou, Saleh Bakri, Sara El Debuch, Angeliki Papoulia
Producers: Brandt Andersen, Ossama Bawardi, Ryan Busse, Charlie Endean
Cinematography: Jonathan Sela
Editing: Jeff Seibeneck
Production design: Julie Berghoff
Casting: Mona Shehabi
Music: Nick Chuba
Production companies: Philistine Films (Jordan)
World Sales: Mister Smith Entertainment (London)
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (Competition)
In Arabic, English, Greek
103 minutes

Palazzina Laf marks the directing debut of actor Michele Riondino, who also plays the lead role as Caterino Lamanna, a hot-headed factory worker lured into a Faustian pact by his bosses, trading low wages and perilous manual labour for promotion, better pay and a company car. In return he agrees to spy on his troublesome colleagues, union activists and strike leaders, reporting anything suspicious back to management. Riondino paints these events in broad slapstick strokes and garish colours, aesthetic choices which may grate with some viewers. But he also turns a fascinating, potentially grim true story into darkly funny and compelling drama. Already a prize-winning domestic release, this lusty workplace farce makes its Maltese debut this week at Mediterrane Film Festival.

The events depicted in Palazzina Laf still have newsy currency in Italy. In 2021 the former owners of the vast ILVA steelworks in Taranto, Fabio and Nicola Riva, were given long jail sentences for allowing their factory to emit deadly pollution for decades, turning the surrounding residential areas into a cancer hotspot and ecological disaster zone. Set in and around this vast industrial complex in 1997, Riondino’s film makes frequent reference to its poisonous effects on the nearby townsfolk. But the director is more focussed on a different chapter of the factory’s toxic culture, a sustained campaign of psychological harassment against various workers during a bumpy period of restructuring and privatisation, which culminated in Italy’s first ever legal prosecution for workplace “mobbing”.

Pursuing a bizarre policy of low-level collective intimidation, company mangers confine 79 employees deemed to be obstructive misfits to a prison-like block on the factory grounds, the eponymous Palazzina Laf, assigning them wages and job titles but no actual work to do. Officially, these outcasts are awaiting new positions after their previous jobs were dissolved, but in reality most lack the specialist skills for the dangerous tasks they are offered by their cynical bosses, who secretly hope they will just resign. Confined to this surreal Kafka-esque limbo, with heavy-handed company security guards acting as their jailers, these methodically demoralised non-workers begin to suffer mental health issues. When Lammana is sent in undercover as one of the inmates, the pressure cooker conditions within become explosive.

Riondino plays Lammana in a hyperbolic comic register, as a shameless opportunist with slicked-back hair, Borat moustache, slippery charm and bawdy sense of humour. But he never treats him as a pure monster, describing his anti-hero as both “a Judas and a poor Jesus”. Indeed, religious imagery figures prominently in this contemporary parable, most strikingly in a feverish dream sequence which blasts off the screen with percussive jump cuts and saturated colours. The real villain of the piece is his boss Basile (Elio Germano), a corporate assassin in sunglasses and designer stubble.

With its stylised period feel, old-school look and overheated comic tone, Palazzina Laf harks self-consciously back to classic Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. There are nods to Fellini’s wedding-cake exuberance here, plus hints of vintage Morricone in Teho Teardo’s brassy, bustling, knowingly nostalgic score. But the film’s most obvious ancestor is Elio Petri’s Cannes prize-winner The Working Class go to Heaven (1971), an irreverent social satire about a model factory worker radicalised by a workplace accident, transformed overnight from pliant management pet to angry leftist agitator.

Hosting the film’s Malta screening, Riondino spoke passionately about his personal connection to the Taranto steelworks, where his own father worked, describing himself an an “activist” as well as a film-maker. But Palazzina Laf is no worthy monochrome polemic, more a messy human story about the dubious moral choices, compromises and betrayals that ordinary people are forced to make at the sharp end of the class struggle. It ends on a powerful punch, with emotionally charged audio testimony from the real workers involved in this landmark case playing over a closing montage, accompanied by statistics that suggest the problem of mobbing in the workplace has since grown into an epidemic.

Director: Michele Riondino
Cast: Michele Riondino, Elio Germano, Vanessa Scalera, Domenico Fortunato, Gianni D’Addario, Michele Sinisi, Fulvio Pepe, Marina Limosani, Eva Cela, Anna Ferruzzo, Paolo Pierobon
Screenplay: Maurizio Braucci, Michele Riondino
Producers: Carlo Degli Esposti, Nicola Serra
Cinematography: Claudio Cofrancesco
Editing: Julien Panzarasa
Music: Teho Teardo
Production companies: Bravo (Italy), Palomar (Italy), Rai Cinema Italy), Paprika Films (France)
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (competition)
In Italian
99 minutes

For Fenech, who has grabbed every chance to work on film crews and learn the ropes, servicing foreign film and TV productions is good for Malta’s economy. But he looks forward to a time when the islanders will be able to use their offshore contacts to export their own productions.

“A lot of us are trying to promote local films and production,” Fenech notes, “but there are not that many Maltese films, unfortunately. Yet we all dedicate our efforts to showcasing our local talents, like the people I have worked with and hope to work with in the future.”

“Lots of my friends are interested in telling local stories connected to Malta,” he adds. “But without local distribution, how can we share these talents?”

As a producer he is currently in post-production on The Home Straight, a feature film directed and coproduced by Keith Tedesco with support from the Malta Film Commission. Set in the world of athletics, it follows student and retired runner Serena Segalle, who despite the discouragement of being born with a club foot, came out of retirement to become one of Europe’s top sprinters.

“Every year our film fund supports local films, but we need more of it in the context of a larger financial structure. There are so many potentially great films from our local artists and producers.”

He noted a big increase in the number of short films being made and their positive effect on bringing out needed voices. Again through the support of the Malta Film Commission, he will direct and produce the short film Honour, Fame & Glory, another sports drama about a boxing coach who lives through a tragedy.

Asked about the role of the Mediterrane Film Festival and how it can boost local production, Fenech has no doubts. “I really like the idea of the festival and its ability to bring foreign producers and directors here. It’s very important to showcase our work and to share our vision with people from abroad. It’s exciting to be a part of something like this.” He plans to see at least two films, the eccentric Greek fantasy Minore and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness.

So it seems the film and TV industry is booming here?

“There’s a lot going on,” he admits. “Malta is a small island and its locations can double for anywhere in the Mediterranean, Africa or southern Europe. It can basically double for whatever the production designer needs.”

He’s an expert in the field, having worked on virtually every big international production that has come to Malta to shoot, from Ridley Scott’s recent Gladiator to Munich, Napoleon and Assassin’s Creed. What else is coming up?

“Currently we’re prepping the British TV series Karen Pirie, about a Scottish detective who solves cold cases.”  Shooting in the adjoining island of Gozo as well as Malta, this production is big business for the locals. According to Malta’s Film Commissioner Johann Grech, the production has created jobs for some 100 local workers. It is also said to be leaving behind €2.3 million for the local economy.

In addition to Karen Pirie, he is prepping K3 and the Tongue of the Mermaids, which he describes as “like Spice Girls for the pre-teen market.”

The one area that is “foreign” to Formosa Randon is local Maltese production, in which he has worked very little. “But there is a lot of talent here in every department, both in front of the camera and behind it – crews, actors, traineeships.”

How is Malta treating you? Have you been here before?

“First time in Malta, but it’s a very special place for me because my father did his National Service in the navy and was stationed in Malta during the Suez Canal crisis. He always talked about Malta and he’s got a lot of friends here. So when they offered me the chance to see it for the first time and be a part of the festival, I was like, definitely! Because he passed away, like, 20 years ago.”

Are there any of his old friends you can look up while you are here?

“There’s one guy, actually. My dad was a friend of Alex Ferguson, and when he left Aberdeen and went to Manchester United, there was a Maltese contingent here who used to come over to the games. There is a guy called Joe, he still lives here, so I’m going to try and look him up. My father came over to his daughter’s wedding and all that stuff.”

How is jury duty going at the Mediterrane Film Festival?

“It’s a real eclectic mix. Some incredibly talented people with CVs that are really intimidating. But we bonded pretty quickly. We’ve seen movies from Turkey, Tunisia, the UK, Gibraltar, France… we’ve got more to see with more variety. There were couple I’ve seen, which at the time I wasn’t sure about, but looking back they made an imprint on me with very sophisticated symbolism, which I don’t have in my films at all. To a point where you have got to work hard to understand what is going on here. But being introduced to cultures in countries from where you don’t usually watch the movies, seeing what’s important to them and what they respond to, it’s quite humbling. It’s also educational.”

Do you learn stuff as a director from immersing yourself in a broader global mix of films?

“100%. I think you’re always… I mean, borrowing. Stealing, basically.

Talent borrows, genius steals.

“There you go. Ha! But yeah, even sometimes on a subconscious level that you are not aware of until maybe a few years later. It definitely imprints on you.”

What can you tell us about your next feature, Everything’s Going to be Great?

“We shot it end of last year in Canada, and it was a brilliant experience. It was with Bryan Cranston, Alison Janney, Chris Cooper. It’s a lower budget film, a real sort of heartwarming family drama. Something like little Miss Sunshine. Coming of age, dysfunctional family, set in the 1980s in rural America. It’s a family who have a traveling regional theatre and they’re trying to make it big, but things don’t go to plan. It’s about how they recover from that. So hopefully will be coming out later this year.”

You shot Filth in your native Scotland and also, very impressively, made contemporary Scotland look like Cold War Moscow in Tetris. To what degree do you consider yourself a specifically Scottish film-maker?

“I’ve shot in Scotland a couple of times, done some post up there. I’m very proud of being Scottish, even though we just got completely humiliated during the Euros. Ha! But I would never say I was a Scottish director. I would say I try and do more international stories, human stories. I’ve lived in England 28 years, longer than I lived in Scotland. But I still talk to my mom and sister every day, hence my accent.”

From your Malta experience so far, can you imagine shooting a film here in future?

“Yeah, I love it! Particularly Valletta is beautiful, I haven’t seen enough of the island yet. Hopefully at the end of the week, we’re gonna go and see the rest of the island. But with just how beautiful this place is and how friendly everybody is – and as I say, my connection, or my father’s connection. I’ve only been here three or four days, but I feel as though there’s something here, something telling me that I’ve got to work here at some point.”

Of course, tales of salty sea-dogs pillaging on the oceans are hardly confined to one brief window of time and strict, specific locales. Still, the richness of the history of piracy in the Mediterranean is somewhat ignored, despite North African corsairs raiding from the Barbary Coast and white, Christian privateers using Malta as a base from which to raid the same seas. This documentary directed by Danielle Proskar seeks not only to highlight how under appreciated these accounts are, but to relate a variety of them in amongst factual context to create a narrative of swashbuckling on Europe’s doorstep.

The film is very much non-fiction in the television documentary tradition – down to its 50-minute running time – but it’s crafted with enough verve and expertise to make it eminently watchable, and the relation of the history is like a treasure chest boasting a hoard of fascinating titbits. From the political machinations that led to military and economic alliances, and the religious underpinnings of clashes over territory, to the ways in which the corsairs of the Mediterranean engaged in the flourishing, state-backed slave trade of the period.

These stories are conveyed through talking head experts recounting the nature of life on the Mediterranean at this time, via the verité account of a crew of maritime archaeologists examining a shipwreck, and through narrativised re-enactments, primarily of the life of Balthasar Sturmer. Although it contains some slightly clunky elements – its fourth wall-breaking buccaneers and some of the action sequences strike a bum note – for the most part the balance between education and entertainment works well. Pirates of the Mediterranean offers some genuinely intriguing historical nuggets while being handsomely shot. Pirates of the Mediterranean is as polished to a doubloon’s sheen.

Director, screenplay: Danielle Proskar
Cast: Felix Stichmann, Daniel Attard, Khaled Riani, Erica Muscat
Cinematography: Harald Staudach, Gianmichele Iaria, Andrew Randon
Editing: Markus Wogrolly
Music: Dorothee Freiberger, David Bronner
Sound: Nils Kirchhoff
Costume: Didi Mitzi
Production companies: ORF, e&a film (Austria), ARTE (France), Urban Canyons (UK/Malta)
Venue: Mediterrane (Out of Competition – Malta Expanded)
In English, German
52 minutes

The original French blueprint for My Way was Comme d’Habitude (“As Usual”), a much more downbeat break-up ballad co-written by singer Claude François, lyricist Gilles Thibaut and composer Jacques Reveaux. In the late 1960s, as a pre-fame songwriter for hire in London, future rock superstar David Bowie penned an early set of English-language lyrics for the song, renaming it Even a Fool Learns to Love, but the publishers rejected his pitch. In response, Bowie wrote his own roaringly dramatic early hit, Life on Mars, based on a similar melody.

But it was Canadian singer-songwriter Paul Anka who struck gold after buying the rights to My Way from its French publisher, reportedly for a dollar. He then added English lyrics about a world-weary man looking back on his life with defiant, chest-swollen pride. By personal request, Anka tailored these words for his friend Sinatra, who was planning his retirement after one last farewell album. He did indeed face his final curtain, in 1971, but soon grew restless. In the mid 1970s he began touring and recording again, partly in response to the huge career-reviving success of My Way. The song became an obligatory live fixture for decades afterwards, to the point where Sinatra became sick of it.

Fortunately for the film-makers, two of the song’s original authors, 83-year-old Reveaux and 82-year-old Anka, are still around to share their memories on camera. François and Sinatra also both appear extensively in the film in archive footage, with Bowie making a couple of brief cameos. Other artists who have performed the song over the decades, or even written songs about My Way in the case of veteran cult art-rock duo Sparks, appear in a revolving background chorus of commentators and experts.

My Way is a testament to one song’s pan-generational power and adaptability, evolving from bitter French ballad to triumphalist all-American anthem, karaoke classic, wedding fixture and funeral standard. Along the way it has inspired thousands of cover versions from artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Willie Nelson, the Gipsy Kings, Robbie Williams, Nina Simone and Sid Vicious. Even if the punk singer’s rowdy demolition job was an inconoclastic stunt, it served as a witty satirical critique of the lyric’s puffed-up arrogance, earning warm praise from Leonard Cohen and others. But Simone’s kinetic, splenetic jazzy reworking is the the most radical inclusion here, and really leaps off the screen.

Bum notes? My Way has a few. But then again, too few too mention. Well, maybe just a couple. For a start, too much of the film’s slender runtime is spent on the recording of two new versions of the song, by Clara Luciani and Ben Harper, both expertly crafted but anodyne, superfluous affairs. Meanwhile, a macabre subplot about a string of 21st century killings in the Philippines, triggered by substandard performances of My Way in karaoke bars, deserves its own stand-alone documentary. Apparently an extreme new form of music criticism, these murders certainly merit deeper cultural analysis than Teston and Azuelos can muster.

Some deeper insights into the song’s political and social dimensions would have been welcome too. For example, it is pretty clear why its core message of macho individualism has long appealed to murderous tyrants and alpha-male narcissists, from Slobodan Milosevic to Vladimir Putin to Donald Trump. But cringing footage of Anka crooning My Way for a smirking Putin, complete with personalised boot-licking lyrics, demands much more critical unpackimg than it gets in this entertaining but overly polite film.

Directors, screenwriters: Thierry Teston, Lisa Azuelos
Cast: Jane Fonda, Paul Anka, Jacques Reveaux, Ben Harper, Clara Luciana, Gabriel Yared, Sparks
Producer: Patrick André
Production company: High Sea Production (France)
World sales: Mediawan Rights
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (David Bowie sidebar)
In English, French
78 minutes

“During World War II this was the most bombed place in Europe,” claims Alan Cassar, our genial host on this rare peek inside the fort complex, which is usually fenced off from public view. But Cassar is not a military historian, nor even a tourist guide. He is the the Senior Exective for Studios and Locations at Malta Film Studios, who run this semi-derelict fortress as a shooting location, most famously serving as the Colosseum and ancient Roman backdrop in Ridley Scott’s historic fight-club epic Gladiator (2000) and its upcoming sequel. Which helps explain why the oldest-looking structures at Fort Risacola are actually the most recent additions: mighty imperial arches, antique statues, and colonnaded walls that stretch away to the horizon like a De Chirico panting.

“Gladiator put us on the map.” Cassar nods. “Before that the original Clash of the Titans, which in my opinion is the best Ray Harryhausen work, was shot between here and the water studios. But then no big names up to 1999 or 2000. The baptism of fire of the fort was Gladiator. After that was the big 2000s trend for sword and sandals, Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy, Helen of Troy, Agora… spectacle films. They were all coming here to replicate what Gladiator did, basically.”

In fact, Ridley Scott’s long relationship with Malta began years before, on the maritime disaster thriller White Squall (1996), whose Caribbean shipwreck scene was shot in Malta’s famous horizon tank using a full-sized mock-up brigantine sailboat. The tanks are located just a few hundred metres from Fort Ricasoli, which proved fateful when Scott brought his first production there.

“White Squall is my go-to storm sequence when it comes to practical effects,” Cassar says, “because it was shot before CGI took over. That was the first time that Ridley came to town. After that, on his break, he just roamed around and he discovered the big fort, which led to Gladiator and his relationship with Malta. More recently, Napoleon and the sequel to Gladiator. And fingers crossed, we might have another one.”

The vast infinity pool tank at MFS is the largest such facility in Europe, able to hold 22 million gallons of filtered sea water pumped in from the nearby Mediterranean. Blending into the horizon to give it a panoramic mid-ocean look, this massive facility was conceived in 1963 by British special effects pioneer Benjamin “Jim” Hole for use on seafaring dramas like The Bedford Incident (1964) and Orca: Killer Whale (1977). Fifteen years later, a plunging conical deep-water tank with twice the capacity was built alongside it for underwater shooting on producer Lew Grade’s notorious box office flop, Raise The Titanic (1980). There are now three tanks on the site.

Malta Film Studios have had a rocky 60-year history, changing names several times as they bounced back and forth between public and private ownership. But the facilities are enjoying a boom in recent years with productions like the first season of Game of Thrones (2011), Sinbad (2012) and Assassin’s Creed (2016). Plus, of course, Scott’s Napoleon (2023) and imminent Gladiator sequel.

On the day The Film Verdict visits, all three water tanks have been drained, and have an eerie sci-fi majesty about them. But at full capacity, they can accommodate multiple film shoots, both above and below water, with wave machines and storm cannons turning even the calmest stretch of water into a raging maelstrom. “With us, you don’t need good actors,” Cassar grins. “You save that money. Because you throw anyone in the water and he will do the performance of his life…”

With major stars and director now a regular sight at Malta Film Studios, Cassar’s job increasingly entails keeping paparazzi away from the open-air water tank, which is easily visible from the nearby ocean. When resourceful snappers began taking telephoto shots from boats, the studio established a new rule that obliges maritime traffic to keep moving.

“We have to give notice to mariners,” Cassar sighs. “When there is a movie shooting, boats can pass, but they cannot stop. I try to make it as comfortable as I can to the film-makers, but to not annoy the public as well. For now, we are on a quiet piece of land on the island. Let’s hope they leave us as quiet as we are.”

For the aging Oliver (Stephen Oliver), providing a solid foundation for his blind son, James (Vladimir Cabak), has been an all-consuming endeavour. Consigned to a small seafront apartment, Oliver is reticent to let James go outside, instead sheltering him from the cruel world. James’ only real connections beyond the four walls around him are his father’s descriptions of the daily happenings on the neighbouring beach and the nearby park, viewed from their windows, and a deeply held pen pal relationship in which James corresponds with a woman named Angie who he loves ferociously and longs to one day meet.

It is evident from early in Kostovski’s film that all is not quite as it seems with Oliver and James’ situation and although the love the father has for his son is evident, the truth of the life James believes himself to be experiencing comes starkly into question. Whether Oliver is just genuinely overprotective, or whether he is himself stunted by a life that has given him little to smile about, is difficult to say. Stephen Oliver wears the years of his character’s hardship in the lines of his furrowed brow and the resignation of every drag he takes on a cigarette, staring forlornly out to see.

As the truth of the scenario becomes apparent, Beautiful Lie leans into the sentimentality of its setup. This is a film about sacrifice in several ways – the sacrifice necessary to provide for your loved ones, the sacrifice necessary to produce great art – but it is also a film about the ways that loneliness shapes and consumes us.

Director, producer, screenplay: Hristijan Kostovski
Cast: Stephen Oliver, Vladimir Cabak, Michelle Martin
Cinematography, editing: Dragan Tutis
Music: Kokan Dimushevski
Sound: Max-Imre Mikovic, Kokan Dimushevski, Renato Rincon
Production companies: GT Visual, HK Films (Malta)
Venue: Mediterrane (Out of Competition – Malta Expanded)
In English
35 minutes

Read more from our coverage of Mediterrane 2024

This is about all the concrete information furnished by the four filmmakers — Ekain Albite, Mikel Ibarguren, Nicolau Mallofré, Adria Roca – who are part of the Negu Collective, a group that has the two short films Erroitz and Laiotz under its belt. The audience is left without enough information to really understand who the girl is and why she is escaping, or who is helping her and why. It is not the stuff commercial thrillers are made of, obviously, but the film is likely to mystify even well-intentioned festival audiences outside Spain, though local viewers will probably catch more references and fill in more pieces of the what’s-going-on-here puzzle.

This rigorously lensed story, set in a perennial haze created by the mists and clouds enwrapping the scenic mountain village of Zubieta, bears some striking similarities to another, much more accessible Spanish film also playing in competition at the Mediterrane Film Festival: Jaione Camborda’s The Rye Horn, about a midwife forced to flee Francoist Spain. She, too, finds shelter, kindness and understanding from simple villagers who offer her their solidarity in exile. Here the girl, played with humble politeness and few words by boyish young actress Jone Laspiur (Ane Is Missing) is passed from hand to hand for a brief stay in hiding. The remarkable thing is that everyone who gives her shelter, clearly at great risk to themselves, is utterly unremarkable. A young man who works at a lumber yard, an older woman who lives on her own, a shepherd who has lost his family somehow. All local people of few words, who often don’t answer the girl’s simplest questions.

There is also a handler, in charge of driving her to different refuges, who finally gives up trying to get her across the border which she can see with her naked eyes. Why doesn’t he walk her across, one wonders? Is her inability to move forward symbolic? The radio mentions a trial of members of ETA, the Basque separatist movement that used terrorism in its campaign for independence. Is she the missing defendant? The characters are not saying.

Watching this slow-moving but visually very beautiful film, one has a sense of participating in the girl’s dilemma of imposed stasis, a painful restriction of movement without a clearly voiced cause. Like in one of the more abstract John Le Carré books, the drama feels urgent, the danger is present, but there is no movement forward – no future, in short, just an endless waiting for some undefined situation to change.

And then it happens. Something changes, radically, and is visualized as an explosion of demonic primitive energy in a wild local carnival involving the whole village. The filmmakers mingle with spectators in this unstaged event where men in devils’ masks (and sometimes little else) burn and rampage to let off steam. It appears their lowest and most violent instincts get the best of them: they even set the old village palm tree on fire, a shocking sight.

Directors, screenplay: Colectivo Negu: Ekain Albite, Mikel Ibarguren, Nicolau Mallofré, Adria Roca
Cast: Jone Laspiur
Producers: Mikel Mas, Ritxi Lizartza Urrestaratzu
Cinematography: Javi Seva
Editing: Edu V. Romero, Ekain Albite
Production design, costumes: Justina Montserrat
Production companies: Cornelius Films (Barcelona), Maluta Films (San Sebastian)
World Sales: Begin Again Films (Madrid)
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (Competition)
In Basque, Spanish
90 minutes

As a young man, Demirkubuz was jailed and tortured for his leftist views following Turkey’s military coup in 1980. Without his prison experience, he once claimed, he would not have become a film-maker. The director cites loneliness as his key dramatic theme, and Life certainly presents us with a bunch of characters who are alienated from each other, even when thrown together by fate.

Adopting a leisurely pace and shifting viewpoint, Demirkubuz initially concentrates on Riza (Burak Dakak), a young bakery worker in a rural backwater town whose arranged marriage has recently been cancelled. Defying pressure from her conservative parents, sullen teenage beauty Hicran (Miray Daner) secretly left town to forge a new life in Istanbul. The couple barely knew each other, so Riza initially shrugs off this public humiliation.

But after much taunting by family and friends, he becomes increasingly fixated on his fugitive fiancée and her mysterious vanishing act. Eventually, he sets off to Istanbul to try and track her down. Demirkubuz keeps Riza’s motives murky: unrequited love? Wounded pride? Violent revenge? There are faint but discernible echoes of John Wayne’s similar quest in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) here, possibly intentional.

Riza’s bumpy adventures among the grifters, sex workers, petty criminals and sarcastic police officers of Istanbul lend the film a more comically absurd tone. He eventually rescues Hicran from the clutches of a clownish pimp and his loose-cannon associate, a clandestine operation that climaxes in a lethal showdown. Forced to return home to the domineering father Memet (Umut Kurt) and stifling village she thought she had escaped, Hicran grudgingly consents to another arranged marriage, this time to middle-aged widower Orhan (Cem Davran), who is wealthy and affectionate but also an obsessively jealous stalker.

Life plots a circular journey, with Hicran initially rejecting the narrow expectations of village life to chase freedom in the big city, only for that to become just another trap, with a slightly different cohort of abusive men in charge. Indeed, a steady background pulse of brutish misogyny runs through Life. “I will kill myself if she comes back alive,” vows Hicran’s father Memet after she goes missing. “If she’s dead I’ll feed her to the dogs.” When she does return, he beats her to the ground and calls her a “whore”, a casual insult also used by most of the film’s other male characters.

In Demirkubuz’s worldview men are routinely violent, controlling and needy, often while also being socially conservative and religiously pious in hypocritical ways. But the director’s deadpan observational style does not deal in absolutes or righteous moral judgements. Despite her father’s monstrous behaviour, Hicran still loves him and craves his approval, while dismissing her mother as “weak and spiritless” for being his chief victim. There are no easy answers here.

Demirkubuz’s approach to cinematic time feels almost purposely anti-dramatic, often jumping past major events to linger on domestic details and ruminative interludes. Various deaths, marriages, divorces and bloody confrontations happen off-screen, including a fatal shooting incident in which the camera zooms in on nearby witnesses rather than the event itself. The director favours long discursive dialogues on the human condition rather than deeper character insights. This banal conective tissue is arguably a more realistic reflection of the human experience than more emotionally charged flashpoints. But while this may be an intellectually valid point, it is a risky approach to drama.

Life is rooted in downbeat naturalism and muted colours, mostly using static shots and ultra-slow pans, its spare lyrical score deployed at a bare minimum. Demirkubuz makes it abundantly clear he is not aiming for upbeat cinematic entertainment here. That said, he does wrong-foot us with an unusually sunny finale, gently hinting that the meaningless void of existence can be made bearable by love, good communication and mutual respect. It’s a small silver lining on a huge cloud but, after three long hours, a welcome one.

Director, screenwriter, producer, editing: Zeki Demirkubuz
Cast: Miray Daner, Burak Dakak, Cem Davran, Umut Kurt, Melis Birkan, Osman Alkas
Cinematography: Cevahir Sahin, Kursat Uresin
Production company: Mavi Film (Bulgaria)
World sales: Basak Emre Pundurs
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (Competition)
In Turkish
193 minutes

Delicately probing the unspoken or unformed desires and attractions of the dancers, along with their often untraditional sexuality and life goals, the directors and an excellent cast dig out some profundity from what could have been a conventional theater story. The action begins in the middle of a performance. To the accompaniment of Steve Shehan’s haunting Oriental melodies, nine dancers move sensuously on stage, forming couples – including same sex – who dissolve seconds later as the configuration changes. Behind them, screens show a post-industrial world of belching smokestacks and poisonous liquids and gases gushing. (The environment is a recurring sub-theme.)

The acclaimed modern dance company “No Borders”, made up of Arabs from all over the MENA region, is just wrapping up a tour of Morocco when the lead dancer Aida (played by director Ben Mahmoud) is deliberately dropped to the floor mid-performance by her partner and boyfriend Hedi (Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui), with whom she is quarreling. It isn’t the kind of career-changing injury that made the heroine of Black Swan turn Soviet agent, but it is painfully incapacitating and, of course, a cruel blow to Aida’s feelings. She not only loves Hedi but is expecting his child.

After this opening trauma, the rest of the film sees the company pile into their tour bus and head off in search of a doctor. Because they are in the middle of the remote Atlas mountains, on a pitch dark road through a forest full of wild animals, finding medical attention is no easy matter. When a monkey brings the bus to a screeching halt, two tires blow out. The driver vanishes into the darkness, in search of spares.

It is at this point that the film takes a major detour from an easily foreseeable race against time to get help, and suddenly becomes a Dantesque journey through a deep forest where the straight way has been lost. One by one the ten characters, who include the company’s tough, silver-haired leader Nawel (Tunisian actress Sondos Belhassen), face their inner demons in a moonlit world out of time.

Nawel’s personal ghost is her husband Nejib, who is missing after being kidnapped in Syria ten years earlier. His brother Hassan (both roles are played by the magnetic Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri) is a leading member of the company, and clearly reminds her of her missing love. It is Hassan who has the unhinged idea of abandoning the bus and walking through the cold woods for help, despite the fact that scouts have reported there are no people, no houses or even lights to be seen. (There are those dangerous wild animals, though, whose rustling in the trees and blood-chilling cries form a steady background soundtrack.) Everyone agrees to follow him anyway, with the men taking turns carrying Aida on their back.

It also becomes clear that Hedi is in love with one of the male dancers, a relationship quite at odds with his former desire to marry and start a family with Aida. He never speaks in the film (perhaps he’s mute?) but conveys enormous feeling through his eyes and body language alone. Actor Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, incidentally, choreographed all the complex dances in the film.

The other side of the motherhood coin is repped, a little too symmetrically, by French Moroccan dancer Hajiba Fahmy in the role of a lithe young woman who puts her dancing body and career over having children, much to the discomfort of her marriage-oriented lover, who accuses her of wanting too much sex.

These little life stories can feel like variations on a theme and tiresomely predictable, and one hopes that Ben Mahmoud’s next screenplays will risk going even farther into unexplored territory, as Backstage tends to do towards the end. As the characters venture deeper and deeper into the natural world, D.P. Benjamin Rufi allows darkness to engulf them; only their outlines appear against the moonlight, while the trees seem to emanate green and pink streaks, like auras. Though the role of nature is somewhat banalized by a monkey attack meant to show nature trying to limit the damage humans do, there is certainly another, more mystical and intriguing connection lurking not far away, one that echoes a certain kind of dreamy Asian cinema.

Directors:  Afef Ben Mahmoud, Khalil Benkirane
Screenplay: Afef Ben Mahmoud
Cast: Sondos Belhassen, Afef Ben Mahmoud, Saleh Bakri, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Sofiane Ouissi, Hajiba Fahmy, Ali Thabet, Abdallah Badis, Salima Abdel-Wahab, Nassim Baddag
Producers: Khalil Benkirane, Afef Ben Mahmoud in association with Isabelle Truc, Tania El Khoury, Ingrid Lill Hogtun, Marie Fuglestein Laegreid, Linda Bolstad Stronen
Cinematography: Benjamin Rufi
Editing: Rawchen Mizouri, Skander Ben Ammar, Afef Ben Mahmoud
Production design: Fatma Madani, Redouane Nasserdine
Costume design: Nezha Dakil, Salima Abdel-Wahab
Music: Steve Shehan
Choreography: Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui  beautiful movements and body language
Sound: Aymen Labidi
Production companies: Lycia Productions, Mesanges Films in association with Iota Production, Les Films De L’Altai, Metafora Production, Duo Film, Film Clinic
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival
In Arabic, French
101 minutes

I Saw the TV Glow charts an intense platonic friendship between two high-school misfits in the mid 1990s. Shy Owen (initially played by Ian Foreman, then Justice Walker) bonds with punky outsider Maddy (a highly compelling Brigette Lundy-Paine) over their shared obsession with The Pink Opaque, a supernatural TV series obviously modelled on Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Because the show screens too late for Owen’s strictly enforced bedtime, Maddy begins cautiously inviting him to her home for Saturday night sleepovers.

The immersively eerie milieu of The Pink Opaque, which concerns two psychic teenage girls battling a grotesque monster called Mister Melancholy, feels much more real to these love-starved superfans than their miserable home lives. Both come from abusive or uncaring families, and both harbour queer feelings, though Owen is more confused about his sexual identity. But their friendship eventually reaches breaking point, with Owen declining Maddy’s invitation to run away together. When Maddy finally resurfaces eight years later, she brings shock news: the creepy dark-mirror netherworld of The Pink Opaque is real, and she wants to take Owen there.

I Saw the TV Glow is clearly a personal passion project for Schoenbrun, who is trans, and uses they/their pronouns. The director began work on the screenplay during their own gender transition, and the storyline functions like a defiant, empathetic pro-trans allegory, with the braver Maddy breaking free from her stifling old identity while the shy Owen keeps his secret self bottled up inside, with painful consequences.

Though it picked up mostly positive reviews at its Sundance and Berlin premieres, I Saw the TV Glow also proved polarising, with not much bandwidth between rapturous raves and lukewarm dismissals. For older viewers who find Generation Z’s obsession with their own gender-fluid identity a little tiresome, this queer fairy tale might feel like an indulgent wallow in self-absorbed narcissism. Walker’s sulky performance is a key weakness here, his whimpering monotone and puppyish eyes more grating than endearing. The fact that he looks almost nothing like Foreman’s younger incarnation of Owen only amplifies this irritant factor.

But more charitable viewers will applaud the film’s bold tonal shifts, richly allusive layers and nostalgic pop-culture myth-making. Besides the Buffy homages, including a small role for former vampire-slaying queer icon Amber Benson, there are clear nods to David Lynch here, plus an explicit steal from David Cronenberg’s queasy body-horror classic Videodrome (1983). By deftly deploying retro-horror tropes to interrogate deeper themes of sexuality and alienation, Schoenbrun also has a kinship with other smart indie directors like Peter Strickland and Jennifer Reeder. But in terms of its overall texture, I Saw the TV Glow arguably owes more Richard Kelly’s cult coming-of-age classic Donnie Darko (2001), which inhabited a similar liminal space between dream and reality, feverish hallucination and teen-angst confessional.

Even when its narrative and performance elements fall short, I Saw the TV Glow remains visually voluptuous, saturating the senses with a vivid nocturama of neon colours, mysterious late-night landscapes and strikingly surreal vignettes. It is also drenched in music, mostly self-consciously retro indie-rock. Winking musical in-jokes are scattered across the film, with Fred Durst of chest-thumping rap-metal band Limp Bizkit a great casting choice as Owen’s bullying father. Singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers has a co-producer credit, appearing both on the soundtrack and in a cameo role. The Pink Opaque itself borrows its title from a 1986 compilation album by revered Scottish dream-pop band The Cocteau Twins, which makes sense, as Schoenbrun’s film conjurs up a similar emotional hinterland of blissed-out psychodrama and nerve-jangling intoxication.

Director, screenwriter: Jane Schoenbrun
Cast: Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman, Lindsey Jordan, Helena Howard, Fred Durst, Danielle Deadwyler, Conner O’Malley, Emma Porter
Cinematography: Eric Yue
Editing: Sofi Marshall
Music: Alex G.
Producers: Emma Stone, Dave McCary, Ali Herting, Sam Intili, Sarah Winshall, Phoebe Bridgers
Production companies: Fruit Tree (US), Smudge Films (US), Hypnic Jerk (US)
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (Out of Competition)
In English
100 minutes

Malta has a long and rich track record as a shooting location for Midnight Express (1978), Popeye (1980), Gladiator (2000), Troy (2004), Munich (2005), The Da Vinci Code (2006), World War Z (2013), Assassin’s Creed (2016), plus the first season of Game of Thrones (2011) and many more. But Mediterrane is still a young film festival. What does a local festival mean for Maltese film culture?

“The festival is important because it continues adding to Malta’s interest in the industry, and showcasing beautiful films from Europe. At the same time it is making a larger celebration about the industry and having great people over from all over the world in Malta, where other movies have shot that maybe they’re not even aware of. It is about Malta continuing to cement its place within the industry.”

Foreign and co-productions are currently booming in Malta right now, is that right?

“When it comes to servicing, of course, a lot of movies are shooting here. Especially in the last six years, we have seen the difference. I have two companies. We have a service company, Valletta Pictures, and also a production company, MaltaFilm. When it comes to movies wanting to shoot in Malta, definitely in the past six years, it has increased a lot because of the visibility, the promotion that Malta has been doing on its part.”

What are the main selling points for Malta as a shooting location?

“It’s a great place to shoot, not only because of the beautiful sunlight and the proximity of locations, getting those distinctive looks. But producers love it because it’s a safe place. Actors love it. They can come here, shoot a movie, of course movie making is stressful, but they can also have a five-star holiday in the sun while doing so. It’s a bit of a win-win. We keep hearing this, the actors love being here. They love Valletta city. They love the fact that they can walk around safely, eat at Michelin-starred restaurants, have all those experiences, and shoot here in the Mediterranean. So overall, the festival is just really adding to that marketing.”

The Malta Film Commission’s cash rebate system now covers up to 40 per cent of key production costs. That is surely another major driving factor?

“Correct. It was 22 per cent, and then it went up, now it’s at 40. It’s a competitive market. I believe UK, Italy, Cyprus, they’re all also pushing up their rebates. Everybody’s trying to take the market share of the big production shooting. The rebate is obviously a great incentive which producers look for. But more important, it works hand in hand with local production, with Maltese movies or movies from Malta. That tool is important to be able to co-produce. Second, because all these movies are coming to Malta, the talent pool, the crew pool is learning. They’re training with Hollywood’s best. So then they can adapt their skills and produce, create their own movies. Which is what we just did, in fact.”

Can you talk about your Malta-based feature, or is that still under wraps?

“We haven’t launched yet, but obviously it’s out there. We’ve just finished filming a Maltese movie, set in Malta, but in the English language. It’s about the theft of a Caravaggio painting in 1984. We’re actually in post-production as we speak. Again, having the experience, the crew that are working on these mega-movies, having them on our set is great because at the end of the day, that creative talent is going to make the movie hopefully feel good and look good.”

Malta is a small country, does it have the talent pool and infrastructure to sustain a growing film industry?

“Absolutely. When it comes to crew resources, for example, today we have three, four times the amount of crew that we did six years ago. Which is great because at that point we could shoot maybe two movies at the same time, but now we can handle way more than that. In fact, last year, I have to double check the numbers, but I think we had 34 productions shooting in Malta. It just keeps getting more productions every year. The year before, it was 28. Even last year with the strikes, we continued doing independent movies and TV shows.”

Two of the most famous blockbusters to shoot in Malta are Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) and its upcoming sequel. Do you notice these huge studio productions happening around you when they sweep into town?

“For sure. The strength that comes with studio movies is that crew are getting paid well, hotels are full, all the restaurants are trying to get the top guys to eat there, ha! In Valletta, you feel it. You go to the hotels, you see film crew, you see the actors. A lot of locals want to be extras, they want to be Roman soldiers. There’s a buzz when a movie like Gladiator comes here, for sure.”

Malta has doubled for Israel, Iran, Turkey, Cuba, ancient Rome and many more locations, but rarely plays itself. What is your favourite film where Malta actually plays Malta?

“Jurassic World Dominion! It’s a fun, great popcorn movie. It was amazing to see Malta play for Malta, seeing the dinosaurs running around Valletta. That was great because, again, it’s quite large scale. To see the streets of Valletta not playing Israel or the Middle East was great. There’s a really interesting moment where a dinosaur just chomps away at a local on a scooter.”

Which films at Mediterrane Film Festival you are most looking forward to seeing?

“I’m really looking forward to the Italian film, Palazzina Laf. Italian cinema has heritage, and we’re so close to them, we share a lot culturally. So I’m excited to see that. It’s set in the Nineties, I like those movies. We’re excited to see who will be taking home the Golden Bees.”

It marks the return of Indian-born filmmaker Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, a master of music videos who turned his visual talents to fantasy films like The Cell and The Fall, before the Ryan Reynolds’ starrer Self/less in 2015 put a brake on his career. Dear Jassi, his first film to be shot in India, takes the eclectic auteur in yet another direction as it unravels the dynamics of first love in a social context gone horribly wrong.

This sad tale, recurrent the world over wherever a progressive feminist culture collides with ancient patriarchal values, is told unemphatically, unfolding first of all as a charmingly innocent relationship that develops, at times, too slowly. Its leisurely pace allows the director to switch back and forth between the lively chaos of a corrupt but multi-colored India, where the engaging male lead Mith (Yugam Sood) scrapes by with a little help from his friends (and the unconditional love of his sharp-tongued mother, played with heroic passion by Baljinder Kaur), and the sterile-feeling Canadian strip mall where the heroine works in a beauty salon. She is strong not just because her family is relatively well-off, but in knowing that she earns her own salary and has her own bank account. All these crucial details are presented casually, leaving the audience to enjoy the burgeoning romance between Jassi and Mithu as almost a light-hearted rom com, until the promised happy ending   lightness in a few deft strokes.

Jaswinder Kaur Sidhu, known as Jassi, is visiting India’s Punjab region with her Indian-Canadian family when her girlfriends take her to a game of kabaddi. This contact sport, played by local lads stripped to the waist and wearing only shorts, is an ideal intro to athletically-built Mithu, the local champion. Jassi is smitten and for Mithu, too, it is love at first sight. Their mutual attraction plays out at a natural pace, and nowhere does the class difference seem to rule out their getting closer. A precedent of sorts is the secret courtship of Jassi’s cousin by a good-looking young pharmacist who has a money-making store in the market. But when he comes calling to announce his intentions, the rifles come out. This unexpected drama of the family white-beards against a well-groomed suitor chimes the hour of the patriarchy and the no-holds-barred way it exerts its claim on the unmarried women in the family.

Yet Jassi, the squeaky clean but ballsy beautician, seems impervious to warnings and foreshadowing in Amit Rai’s subtle screenplay, based on Fabian Dawson’s book. When her ailing father dies suddenly, she comes under the control of her uncle, the same one who shot at her cousin’s fiancé. Most of all, she naively imagines her beloved mother, played as a self-absorbed hysteric by Sunita Dhir, will take her side and protect her. In the end, Jassi’s admirable courage counts for very little, while her misjudgment of the situation, sadly, counts a great deal.

The opening and closing scenes show a beautiful use of non-narrative symbolism that takes the story to a higher octave, as the well-known poet and singer Kanwar Grewal, sitting beside another musician on a green farm field, sings of the tragic love story being told. His eccentric but authoritative voice invokes God while it refutes taking traditional teachings literally (to paraphrase: “If bathing and baptism were enough to attain enlightenment, every frog and fish would be in heaven”), and its return at the end of the film gives a sense of meaning and closure.

A shout-out to Brendan Galvin’s cinematography, with its distinctive shots taken not from drones but from low-tech rooftops that reveal so much about the Sikh community, and production designer Tanisha Goswami’s deeply felt emphasis on natural locations and bright colors, particularly the sensual contrast between reds and greens.

Director, editor: Tarsem Singh Dhandwar
Screenplay: Amit Rai based on a book by Fabian Dawson
Cast: Pavia Sidhu, Yugam Sood, Gourav Sharma, Sukhwinder Chahal, Sunita Dhir, Baljinder Kaur
Producers: Rajesh Bahl, Sanjay Grover, Bhushan Kumar, Krishan Kumar
Cinematography: Brendan Galvin
Production design: Tanisha Goswami
Costume design: Komal Shahani
Music: Kanwar Grewal
Production companies: Creative Strokes Productions (India), T-Series (India), Wakaoo Films (India)
World Sales:Lichter Grossman Nichols Adler Feldman & Clark Inc. (Los Angeles)
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (competition)
In Punjabi, English
132 minutes

Sweet Dreams takes place on a sugar plantation in an unnamed corner of Indonesia somewhere around the year 1900, just as the Dutch colonial powers are beginning to lose their grip over a restless indigenous population. Pompous, arrogant, extravagant whiskered plantation owner Jan (Hans Dagalet) lives a grand life, flanked by his long-suffering wife Agathe (veteran Dutch screen icon Renée Soutendijk) and his local concubine Siti (Hayati Azis), who serves as housemaid and mother to Jan’s illegitimate young son Karel (Rio Den Haas). But Jan’s sudden death brings a torrent of latent tensions bubbling to the surface. There is trouble in paradise.

The sugar factory workers are on strike, led by revolutionary hothead Reza (Muhammad Khan), who has his own romantic designs on the proud Siti, imploring her to flee the plantation with him. Anxious about losing her life of idle privilege, Agathe summons her grown-up son Cornelius (Florian Myjer) and his heavily pregnant wife Josefien (Lisa Zweerman) to Indonesia to help run the family business.

A comically effete North European lily wilting in the sultry tropical heat, Cornelius only dreams of selling the sugar factory and returning to the Netherlands as soon as possible. The hormonally deranged Josefien, meanwhile, is desperate for sexual satisfaction, whether from a bedpost or an obliging local man. In a gleefully anarchic twist, it soon emerges that Jan’s will leaves the entire sugar business to his bastard son Karel, a bitter shock that leads the desperate Dutch overlords mulling homicidal schemes and shady Faustian deals.

Filmed on the former French island colony of Reunion after a planned Indonesian shoot fell through at late notice due to Covid restrictions, Sweet Dreams has a heavy stylised look that makes a virtue of its own stagey mannerisms. Sendijarevic and her regular cinematographer Emo Weemhoff drew on the childlike jungle vistas of French post-impressionist Henri Rousseau for inspiration, exoticised orientalist visions painted by a man who never left France. There are echoes of the classic Dutch Masters in the film’s interior scenes too, with their precisely framed geometry, dark wooded panels and chequered floor tiles. Weemhoff also uses smashed mirrors, candlelight and smoke to striking visual effect. Shot in the boxy Academy ratio, these meticulously composed tableaux are consistently pleasing to the eye.

Sweet Dreams lays on its anti-colonial message pretty thickly, purposely favouring heightened caricature over psychological complexity. The Dutch protagonists are all either grotesque villains or self-aggrandising idiots, the Indonesians mostly depicted as noble victims, although at least Siti and Reza are permitted more ambivalent moral and emotional shading.

Likewise, some of the plot twists only make sense on a symbolic level rather than as plausible human drama. A final explosive bonfire of the vanities feels particularly improbable, with too many characters calmly embracing their own destruction for narrative convenience. That said, Sendijarevic has pushed the film’s self-consciously theatrical style from the start, so she has earned the right to shun naturalism for a more archly ironic register, which is lightly sprinkled with surrealism and magical realism. Martial Foe’s generously deployed score, a kind of jarringly discordant fairground music, adds to the sense of European colonial fantasies slowly collapsing into tragicomic farce.

Director, screenwriter: Ena Sendijarevic
Cast: Renée Soutendijk, Hayati Azis, Lisa Zweerman, Florian Myjer, Muhammad Khan, Hans Dagalet, Rio Den Haas
Producers: Erik Glijinis, Leontine Petit
Cinematography: Emo Weemhoff
Production designer: Myrte Beltman
Costume designer: Bernadette Corstens
Editing: Lot Rossmark
Music: Martial Foe
Production company: Lemming Film (Netherlands), VPRO (Netherlands), Plattform Produktion (Sweden), Film ï Vast Sweden (Sweden), Tala Media (Indonesia)
World sales: Heretic
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (Competition)
In Dutch, Indonesian
98 minutes

Almost 55 years ago, in July 1969, a then-unknown Bowie made his first visit to Malta to perform at the International Song Festival, held at the Hilton hotel in Valletta. His breakthrough hit Space Oddity had just been released, but the long-haired folk-pop singer from South London played an older composition, the wistful When I Live My Dream, plus a Maltese song for which he had composed English lyrics, No-One Someone. He won second prize in the contest, played an impromptu show for the crew of a US aircraft carrier docked in Valletta harbour, and sent a telegram to his wife Angie complaining the weather was “bloody hot”.

More than half a century later, Bowie’s legacy lives on in Malta, with a slender program of festival screenings plus a masterclass on his cinematic work hosted by Adrian Woottonm CEO of Film London. The key title, an audiovisual feast on the big screen, is the late rock icon’s first major acting role as Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Charting the slow corruption of an extra-terrestrial business tycoon adrift in the hostile alien weirdness of 1970s America, director Nicolas Roeg’s cult sci-fi classic was a perfect fit for Bowie, who was exiled in the US himself at the time, insulating himself from high-pressure supernova fame with a major cocaine habit. Roeg was also a great match for Bowie: both were visionary English mavericks with a shared taste for the avant-garde, surrealism, random cosmic connections and occult mysticism.

Cerebral, hypnotic and luminously beautiful, The Man Who Fell to Earth remains a richly rewarding inner-space odyssey half a century later. It is certainly dense with literary allusions, from Icarus and Daedalus in Greek mythology, who plunged earthwards after flying too close to the sun, to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. There are strong Biblical echoes too, with Newton as a messianic innocent betrayed by Judas-like friends. The passing decades have added some more timely resonances, notably climate change, with Newton fleeing ecological catastrophe on his home planet. The film clearly struck an autobiographical chord with Bowie, who revisited his most feted screen alter ego at the end of his life in his hit stage musical Lazarus.

But Bowie’s relationship with the big screen went deeper than his acting sideline. His music itself was cinematic, widescreen and immersive, drawing on a deep filmic hinterland for visual and lyrical inspiration. Indeed, his 1969 breakthrough hit Space Oddity was a thinly veiled homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a spectacular psychedelic opus about a stranded astronaut undergoing a mystical transformation on the farthest fringes of the galaxy. Even the astronaut’s name, David Bowman, felt like an uncanny echo. Bowie would later borrow elements of Kubrick’s next film, A Clockwork Orange (1971), for his dystopian glam-rock messiah persona Ziggy Stardust.

Long before he crossed over into acting, cinematic allusions and cracked actors figured prominently in Bowie’s work, from the famous Greta Garbo pose he replicated on the cross-dressing cover of his 1971 album Hunky Dory to his mid 1970s live tours, which borrowed their stage designs and stark monochrome palette from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and other German Expressionist classics. On his 1976 Isolar tour Bowie even screened the surreal silent short Un Chien Andalou (1929), a collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí, before coming onstage.

As an actor, Bowie earned some of his finest notices for his co-starring role on Nagisa Oshima’s elegant literary adaptation Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983), a lyrical depiction of sadism, stoicism and unspoken homoerotic desire in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. By stark contrast, he also played a suave vampire entangled in a bisexual love triangle with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon in the stylish but shallow erotic thriller The Hunger (1983), directed by Tony Scott, brother of Ridley. Much mocked at the time, his role as goblin king Jareth in Muppets mastermind Jim Henson’s fairy-tale puppet fantasy Labyrinth (1986) has earned enduring cult appeal, partly because the singer’s winking performance as a diabolical charmer with glam-rock hair and prominent trouser bulge made him a sex symbol to a whole new generation of younger female fans.

In his later career, Bowie mostly retired from acting, though he occasionally popped up in offbeat indie dramas and minor festival films. But he was sporadically lured back in front of the camera by high-profile offers from major directors like Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and Christopher Nolan. His cameo as Pontius Pilate in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) may be brief, but it is electrifying. “He left behind a remarkable body of work,” Scorsese told Entertainment Weekly shortly after Bowie’s death in 2016. “His music and his image and his focus were always changing, always in motion, and with every movement, every change, he left a deep imprint on the culture.”

Increasingly reclusive in his autumn years, Bowie initially declined Christopher Nolan’s offer to play maverick Serbian genius inventor Nikola Tesla in the deluxe magic-trick thriller The Prestige (2006). But Nolan persisted, ultimately capturing one of the late rock legend’s most memorably bizarre screen roles. “Tesla was this other-worldly, ahead-of-his-time figure,” the director told Entertainment Weekly in 2016, “and at some point it occurred to me he was the original Man Who Fell to Earth.”