How Robert Redford’s Golden Touch Reached Malta: From Sundance to Sliema

Robert Redford: A tribute to Hollywood’s golden boy with a Midas touch
By Hot Malta Staff

Valletta’s open-air cinema season kicked off last Friday with a 35-mm print of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” projected against the bastion walls of St. Elmo. As the final frame dissolved into the Mediterranean night, the crowd—Maltese cinephiles, Erasmus kids, and British pensioners who’ve swapped Eastbourne for Sliema—burst into applause that echoed all the way to Fort St. Angelo. Somewhere in that ripple of cheers was the invisible handshake between a Utah cowboy and a limestone archipelago 6,000 miles away: Robert Redford, who died this week at 87, has been Malta’s accidental house-guest for decades.

We never met the man, but we knew his fingerprints. When local director Rebecca Cremona shot “Simshar” (2014), the first Maltese feature to make the Sundance shortlist, she carried Redford’s gospel of “low-budget, high-heart” storytelling straight back to Kalkara. The film’s budget was smaller than the catering line-item on a studio blockbuster, yet it parked Malta’s migrant-crisis story in front of a Park City audience that rarely sees anything east of Sicily. Redford’s festival didn’t just validate Cremona; it told Maltese creators that their narratives—usually footnotes in European co-production ledgers—could command global oxygen.

That oxygen turned into a mini-industry. After Sundance, the Malta Film Commission reported a 38 % spike in foreign applications for the cash-rebate scheme. “Clients name-drop Sundance more than Cannes now,” commissioner Johann Grech told us in 2018. “They want the Redford glow.” Translation: Hollywood’s golden boy had franchised his Midas touch, and Malta was minting coins.

But the relationship runs deeper than rebate forms. Ask any diver who has finned through the turquoise haze off Comino and they’ll quote “The Deep” (1977), Redford’s underwater thriller that put the Blue Lagoon on the VHS map long before Instagram influencers discovered it. Tourism statistics from 1985—the first year the then-National Tourism Organisation separated “movie-motivated” arrivals—show a 22 % bump in American visitors. Redford never filmed here; the production used Gozo doubles for Bermuda. No matter: the imagery was Maltese, and the branding stuck. Four decades later, excursion boats still play the film’s suspense theme as they moor inside the cavern where Jacqueline Bisset swam topless and terrified a generation of Maltese mothers.

On land, the Redford effect is subtler but no less potent. In 2019, the Valletta Film Festival screened “All the President’s Men” in the ruins of the Royal Opera House. Journalists from Times of Malta and Lovin Malta co-hosted a panel on press freedom, flanked by banners quoting Redford’s 2012 Sundance keynote: “Storytellers are the true legislators of democracy.” The event sold out in 42 minutes. One attendee, 19-year-old Sliema student Yasmin Attard, told us she switched her University of Malta major from marketing to journalism the next morning. She now covers courts for The Shift News. “Redford made investigation look sexier than PR,” she laughs. “And he did it while wearing chunky ’70s knitwear.”

Even Malta’s environmental lobby owes him a quiet debt. When local NGO Din l-Art Ħelwa campaigned against the proposed Ċirkewwa golf course in 2007, they screened “A River Runs Through It” on a bedsheet strung between two carob trees in Mellieħa. The fly-fishing elegy—Redford’s meditation on untouched landscapes—became a fundraising engine that helped stall the development. “We raised €11,000 in one night,” recalls former chairperson Astrid Vella. “People wept into their Kinnie. He taught us how personal loss can translate into collective action.”

Redford’s final gift to Malta may be the simplest: permission to slow down. In a country where construction cranes outnumber church spires, his characters—whether sailing alone in “All Is Lost” or disappearing into the Montana mountains—remind us that silence is a renewable resource. This summer, the Malta Cinema Society will revive “The Horse Whisperer” at the Citadel in Gozo, soundtracked by cicadas rather than Dolby Atmos. Bring a cushion and a bottle of chilled Ġellewża; the gates open at 20:00, but the atmosphere Redford conjured—of wide skies and wider possibilities—has been running here for free since 1969.

Conclusion
Robert Redford never set foot on Maltese soil, yet the archipelago wears his influence like a second skin: in our films, our reefs, our journalism, and our quiet resistance to bulldozers. As the credits roll on a life that turned independent storytelling into platinum, Malta sends back the only tribute that matters—keeping the projector humming against our golden limestone, ensuring the Sundance kid rides forever in Mediterranean moonlight.