The fourth installment of the Malta Film Commission’s Mediterrane Film Festival is nearly ready to roll.
Festival directors Pierre Agius and Mark Adams have assembled a selection, anchored by the theme “Beyond Together,” that includes recent films from directors like Steven Soderbergh, Alice Winocour, Gus Van Sant, Mark Jenkin, Karim Ainouz and Olivier Assayas starring the likes of Angelina Jolie, Charli XCX, George MacKay, Callum Turner, Elle Fanning, Pamela Anderson, Paul Dano, Alicia Vikander, Jude Law, Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel, Al Pacino, Bill Skarsgard, Colman Domingo and more.
Set to take place on the island’s capital city of Valletta from June 21-28, the Mediterrane Film Festival has expanded from three to five strands with a total of 35 films selected: Big Screen Competition featuring the best of mainstream cinema, Mediterranean Competition featuring new cinema from the Mediterranean region with a spotlight on local stories and talent, Mare Nostrum for films with an environmental message, New World Cinema, and Malta Focus for specifically local films (shorts and features) that highlight island talent.
The Big Screen Competition will feature Soderbergh’s art forgery drama, The Christophers, starring Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel, Alice Winocour’s fashion drama Couture starring Jolie, Van Sant’s hostage thriller Dead Man’s Wire with Skarsgard and Domingo, the Charli XCX-fronted mockumentary The Moment, and Jenkin’s drama Rose of Nevada starring MacKay and Turner, Ainouz’s Rosebush Pruning starring Turner, Fanning, Anderson, Jamie Bell and Riley Keough, Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day starring Haley Bennett, Jack Whitehall, Lily Allen, Jennifer Saunders and Timothy Spall, and Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin starring Dano, Vikander, Tom Sturridge, Will Keen, Jeffrey Wright and Law.
The Wizard of the Kremlin
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Charli XCX appears in The Moment by Aidan Zamiri
Courtesy of Sundance
The Mediterrane Competition includes Maryam Touzani’s Calle Malaga, Leyla Bouzid’s In a Whisper, Nicolangelo Gelormini’s La Gioia, Minos Papas’s Motherwitch, Micha Wald’s A Survivor’s Tale, Yasser Shafiey’s Complaint No. 713317, Maltese psychological drama Vanitas, set on the island of Gozo, and Sylvain Chomet’s animated A Magnificent Life.
The New World Cinema section has drafted Kiah Roache-Turner’s Beast of War, which was shot in Malta, Mario Martone’s Fuori, Anders Thomas Jensen’s The Last Viking starring Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Ben Wheatley’s Normal starring Bob Odenkirk, The Good Boy (aka Heel) starring Stephen Graham, Anson Boon and Andrea Riseborough, Larry Yang’s The Shadow’s Edge with Jackie Chan and Tony Leung Ka-fai, James Lucas’s Moss & Freud, and Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s Broken English documentary about Marianne Faithfull.
The Mare Nostrum section features Jeanie Finlay’s All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea, Valentin Paoli’s The Musician and the Whale, Tamara Kotevska’s The Tale of Silyan, Ed Sayers’ Super Nature and Sara Dosa’s Time and Water.
Competition titles will be screened by a jury of creatives tasked with selecting the winners of the Golden Bee Awards, which will be doled out at a gala on June 28. Ticket sales for all screenings will be donated to the local Maltese cancer charity Puttinu Cares. More information on the Mediterrane Film Festival can be found here.
