The first Valletta Film Festival (VFF) kicks off in June at various venues in the capital, including Fort St Elmo, Pjazza San Gorg, the Embassy Cinemas, St James Cavalier and Pjazza Teatru Rjal.

The festival is organised by the Film Grain Foundation, a non-profit organisation established to foster appreciation for film.

The founders are Bojana Dimitrovska, Oliver Mallia and Slavko Vukanovic and, according to their mission statement, “the aim of the VFF is to become a leading cultural event in Malta and a major film festival in the Mediterranean, presenting to local and international audiences high-quality productions from around the world”.

The festival will include feature films, short films, and documentaries; of the 250 films submitted, 14 features and documentaries and 12 short films will be selected for the main competition.

Six films will be screened out of competition while the festival will also include two ‘sidebar’ events – Islanders, which will showcase films from different islands all over the world; and Without Borders, which will feature a selection of films from Scandinavia.

Palme d’Or winning director Roland Joffé will be on the jury

Films participating in the main competition will be competing for seven awards, decided by three international juries consisting of film professionals.

In what is quite a coup for the organisers, the head of jury will be Oscar-nominated and Palme d’Or-winning director Roland Joffé, best known for such films as The Mission, The Killing Fields and City of Joy.

The winners will be given the Triton award, designed by Charles Vella, and the award categories include Best Feature Film, Best Documentary, Best Short Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Master of Cinema.

The latter will be awarded to Sicilian director Giuseppe Tornatore, and the festival will also offer a celebration of his films including the 1989 Academy Award winner for the Best Foreign Language film, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso.

The festival will open with a screening of Taxi, one of the six films being screened out of competition.

Taxi was the Golden Bear Winner at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival – it is a film by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who made the film despite the ban imposed on him by the Iranian authorities.

The Valletta Film Festival will include more than just film- screenings.

It will feature a series of masterclasses in conjunction with Cine Guilds of Great Britain – these will include sessions with international experts in crowd-funding and film, creative producing, marketing a film, production design and cinematography.

With such a fascinating line-up, a rather extensive series of film-related events and the significant scope of the festival overall, it is a rather ambitious project and, the organisers hope, the first of many.

“We definitely want to make this an annual event,” says Mallia, who is one of the festival directors together with Vukanovic.

“We want it start with a bang because we wanted to organise a proper festival. It’s certainly a very small festival in the context of other similar ones that are organised around the world, but I believe it’s going to be a major event for Malta, what with the number of films being screened and the kind of people that we are bringing over.

“That Roland Joffé accepted to be our head of jury shows that people of a certain calibre within the international film industry understand that what we are trying to put together is no joke, that it’s quite a professional event.”

What are the organisers’ expectations from the festival? Mallia replies: “Our expectations are that we will get audiences made up of Maltese, tourists and ex-pats to fill the main venues we want people to understand that this promises to be a unique experience for them.”

As for the choice of the films themselves, Mallia explains that most of the films that will be screened at the festival are films which otherwise would in all likelihood not get distribution in Malta.

“They are masterpieces: they are really beautiful films, not solely ‘arty’ films,” he says. “They are actually good films that are not part of the Hollywood machine. Hopefully we’ll get more people to understand the validity of these films in the context of the reality we live in.”

Rebecca Anastasi, who with Angelique Muller is in charge of programming, adds: “When selecting the films we looked for quality. The most important thing that we have quality works that we can show to the audience, and which hopefully will instil more of a film culture where we think about film as an art form.”

The final selection of films will be announced on Satuday as will the names of the members of the international juries.

The Valletta Film Festival takes place between June 15 and 21 and is supported by the Malta Arts Fund and by the venue providers.

www.vallettafilmfestival.com

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