Tomorrow, the curtain rises on the Valletta Film Festival, which until next Sunday transforms the city into a cinema, where feature films, documentaries and short films from all over the world will be screened in five venues across the capital.
Fort St Elmo, Pjazza San Ġorġ, Pjazza Teatru Rjal, the Embassy Cinemas and St James Cavalier will play host to a series of eclectic films... films from Malta itself and neighbouring countries like Italy, and from far-flung places – the Philippines to the east, Cuba to the west and Finland to the north. Numerous films will tackle myriad subjects in an explosion of world cinema in what the organisers hope will be the first of an annual event.
Tomorrow, the festival will be launched with a screening of Iranian film Taxi, by director Jafar Panahi who also stars as a taxi driver shuttling people around the City of Tehran.
The seven feature films in the Valletta Film Festival’s official competition take us to locations as diverse as a Japanese bakery and a secluded seaside town to a Guatemalan volcano. They tackling some topical and hard-hitting issues such as teen suicide, the class divide, and drug abuse while featuring well-drawn characters from all walks of life.
From South America, Europe and beyond come An (a Japan/France/Germany co-production), Bridgend from Denmark and the UK, the Polish film Body, Chile’s The Club, the Guatemalan/French co production Ixcanul Volcano, Brazil’s The Second Mother and from Germany, Wanja.
The documentaries in line for the Best Documentary Award are How To Change The World from the US, which traces the origins of activist organisation Greenpeace; the Ukraine/UK/US co-production The Russian Woodpecker in which an artist seeks to learn more about the Chernobyl disaster; from Denmark, Finland, Indonesia, Norway & the UK comes The Look of Silence, the sequel to director Joshua Oppenheimer’s acclaimed documentary The Act of Killing;
Hand Gestures looks at the work carried out in a bronze foundry; Orion – The Man Who Would Be King’ from the UK; Denmark’s Skin and Bones is the uplifting tale of a group of friends suffering from Progressive Muscular Dystrophy; while Something Better to Come, a Polish/Danish co-production, looks at the life of an eleven-year-old who lives on a garbage dump outside Moscow.
The Best Short Film prize will be hotly contested by a total of 22 short films from Iceland, Tunisia, Rumania, Serbia, Moldova, Malta and many more; presenting snippets of life as they tell their diverse stories of friendship, sex, grief, illegal immigration, disability, and brotherhood with a Jim Morrison doppelganger, factory workers building coffins, and a war waged on a kitchen table among the many plot lines featured.
The festival is not just about the competition
Awards will be given out on the final night of the festival for best feature film, best documentary, best short film, best director, best actor and best actress. The jury is headed by acclaimed director Roland Joffe.
The Master of Cinema award will be handed to acclaimed Sicilian director Giuseppe Tornatore, and audiences will be given the opportunity to revisit some of his best-loved films, including, of course, Academy Award-winner Cinema Paradiso (1988).
The Valletta Film Festival is not just about the competition, however and will also feature two ‘sidebar’ events. The Islanders section will feature a fascinating choice of films from islands around the world offering a perspective of island life that is completely unlike ours, while offering Maltese audiences the chance to see films from many a unique place.
Hiking brings a man and his estranged grandson together in the Philippines/France co-production Above The Clouds; in the Haiti/France/Norway co-production Murder in Pacot, a wealthy couple deals with the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake; from Georgia comes Corn Island, in which an old man grows corn on an island between Georgia and Abkhazia; Cuba presents The Pro-ject of the Century where a man, his father and grandfather examine their broken dreams; while from Trinidad & Tobago comes gritty crime drama God Loves the Fighter.
The second sidebar event is Without Borders, presenting a series of films from Scandinavia, which has a long and rich history of exceptional cinema.
In The Grump from Finland, a grumpy old man moves in with a young businesswoman; in Swedish film Flocking a 14-year-old girl accuses a classmate of rape; Danish film In Your Arms deals with the delicate topic of assisted suicide; while, also from Sweden, My Skinny Sister tackles anorexia; and finally, Sumé – The Sound of a Revolution is a Greenland/Denmark/Norway co-production– that charts the rise of the Greenlandic rock band Sumé.
Other films featuring out of competition include Born in Gaza, a documentary about the effect of the 2014 Gaza offensive on the children of the region; Chinese drama Mountains may Depart; from Morocco comes Much Loved, which chronicles the experiences of a group of Moroccan prostitutes; documentary Messi is a biopic of the legendary Barcelona and Argentina footballer; while the documentary Six Desire: DH Lawrence and Sardinia follows in the footsteps of the novelist and critic Lawrence in his travels through Sardinia.
Palio, about the renowned Italian competition and the world’s oldest horse race, will bring the curtain down on the festival today week.
www.vallettafilmfestival.com