Film buffs can start gearing up for 14 solid days of 14 films - most award-winning or nominees - from 14 countries in the sixth edition of the Malta International Film Festival.
Organised by KRS Film Distributors, it is being held at the Embassy Cinema in Valletta between October 28 and November 10, with each film being shown twice and four different screenings a day for flexibility.
The festival is presenting an array of masters of the art, from Pedro Almodóvar to Jan Troell, Paolo Sorrentino and Walter Salles, among others.
KRS said its main thrust is coming from two politically-motivated films: Sorrentino's Il Divo, described as an extraordinary, urgent movie about the intricacies of party politics as they interweave around a major political figure, Giulio Andreotti; and Uli Edel's The Baader Meinhof Complex, an objective, detached and powerful account of German urban terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Politics of the social sort is evident in Daniela Thomas and Walter Salles's Linha De Passe, in which an impoverished, working-class, single mother tries to keep her family of four differently fathered sons together in a corrupt South American city. Poetic and haunting is also Aditya Assarat's Wonderful Town, which traces the progress of a doomed love affair between a local girl and an outsider in a closed community, still suffering the devastations of the 2004 tsunami. And even more tender is the story of a housewife, who learns how to give transience a permanent form by capturing Everlasting Moments with her camera in Troell's account of working-class life in Sweden between the wars.
In Broken Embraces, Almodóvar narrates the painful sacrifices involved in a series of relationships between parents and children. And maternal bonds also feature in Safy Nebbou's disturbing film The Mark of an Angel, which portrays a mother whose mind has been shattered by grief.
This year's films touch on a wide spectrum of genres, from comedy to drama and even Western style. They include Peter Ho-Sun Chan's spectacular The Warlords; Asif Kapadia's Far North; Jonas Cuaron's experimental, minimalist Ano Una, told only through still photographs; Jeremy Podeswa's Fugitive Pieces; Duncan Jones' psychological science fiction Moon; Kim-Ji-Woon's action-packed The Good The Bad The Weird; and Nikhil Advani's Bollywood romp Chandni Chowk to China.
KRS managing director Charles Pace said the company worked for a whole year to secure these movies of which only limited copies exist.
The aim of the festival is to cater for a select audience who appreciate this sort of film, including students, theatregoers and even foreigners.
The problem, according to Mr Pace, is that Maltese are not accustomed to watching films with subtitles, as are 11 of the movies at the festival.
Tickets for the festival movies showing between Monday and Friday before 5 p.m. cost €5; and for those after 5 p.m. and at the weekend cost €6.20.
Cinema stats
Between January and October KRS released a total of 133 films, marking a decrease of nine compared to the same period in 2008. Comedies proved to be the most popular, and among the top five - those that attracted the highest cinema attendances in the 10-month period - were Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Angels and Demons, Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, The Proposal and The Hangover.
Among the 22 films that had to be withdrawn after one week of exhibition, having registered poor attendances, were Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon.