As Maltese writer/director Rebecca Cremona prepares the next phase of filming on Simshar, Paula Fleri-Soler sat down with her to discover what influenced her decision to make the film, its themes and her efforts to ensure it remains a wholly Maltese production.
Any interview with Rebecca Cremona will start off with the emphasis that the film Simshar is not a documentary. It is inspired by tragic events in July 2008, when a fishing boat exploded and killed four people, including a young boy. However, the incident is merely a springboard for the story Cremona ultimately wants to tell.
Simshar is about universal themes
The screenplay, written by Cremona and David Grech, has three strands: the fishermen on the boat, their anxious families on land, and a parallel story where a Maltese doctor boards a trawler carrying immigrants. The trawler is stuck between Malta and Lampedusa as the respective authorities fight over who is responsible for them.
“When I met Simon Bugeja (the sole survivor of the tragedy), there were a lot of themes in his account I found really interesting,” says Cremona. “The fishing community that is facing challenges in a changing world, change that influences a lot of different aspects of Maltese life – in the architecture, in the language, the way we view ourselves, joining the EU and the migration issue... I thought Simshar could serve as a really good vehicle for these themes which, I think, are central to contemporary Maltese life.”
The migration issue comes into the story not only due to the presence of a Somali national (Malian in the film) on board the vessel at the time of the incident. It was a throwaway comment from Bugeja as Cremona was leaving that opened up the theme.
“I said I thought it was quite incredible how they spent seven days in the Mediterranean, which is quite a busy sea, and weren’t seen,” she recalls.
“Simon replied that they had been seen and not picked up because they may have been mistaken for irregular migrants. He said this happened all the time.”
This startling claim led Cremona to investigate further. Conversations with trawler captains, professional and amateur fishermen and pleasure boat owners led her to discover that the once cardinal rule of saving people in distress at sea no longer applied.
Until that point, Cremona confesses, she felt that while Bugeja’s ordeal was an incredible incident of survival, it was more suitable for a documentary maker. However, Bugeja’s claim made her discover the parallel universe that is out at sea.
Warming to the subject, Cremona explains that “migration is now a part of our everyday reality and it’s a point of contestation for many people.”
However, this is certainly not the only thing Simshar is about. “I was interested in this human story... a reality that could be explored. My interest is in telling an engaging story.”
The next phase of Simshar’s filming will be away from the Mediterranean Film Studios’ tanks and the inherent complications that come with filming in water, and will involve plenty of location work and crowd scenes.
Once that phase of filming is over, the film should be completed by the end of the year. Cremona is quietly confident that it will find a distributor. “The one thing I know about Simshar is I pitched it three times in Cannes,” she says, “and each time I managed to get foreign producers interested in it. But when you go into co-production, some of it would have to be done here and some in the other country. When that happens, the criteria of the other country will start to influence the nature of the story.
“I wanted to preserve the dignity and the authenticity of Simshar as a Maltese film, because what’s the point of making it if it’s not going to be a Maltese film?”
Cremona is clearly passionate about this, going on to explain that it doesn’t mean that the story is not universally and internationally relevant.
Cremona believes the initial interest will boost the film from a marketing point of view. After all, Simshar is about universal themes: the struggle for survival, the juxtaposition of tradition and change.
Moreover, she can draw on the positive experience she had with the final distribution on her previous project, the excellent short film Magdalene. She heeds the advice of head of development at Kennedy-Marshall where she used to work: “Focus on the quality and the quality will always surface and people always find it.”