Valletta Hosts Explosive Weekend of European Cinema—And One Gozitan Teen Steals the Show

A celebration of European stories on screen
By Hot Malta Staff

Valletta’s Republic Street was briefly louder than usual last Saturday evening, but the cheers weren’t for a festa band or a political rally—they were for a 14-year-old Gozitan actor, Leah Portelli, who had just stepped onto the red-carpet squares laid in front of the Grandmaster’s Palace. Clutching a homemade popcorn box shaped like the EU flag, she grinned at a phalanx of phone cameras and shouted, “I’ve never seen my village on a cinema screen before tonight!”

Portelli is one face of “European Stories on Screen”, a travelling film festival that landed in Malta for the first time, turning three historic venues—Spazju Kreattiv, the Valletta Campus Theatre and an open-air pop-up in Strait Street—into living rooms for 48 contemporary films from every EU member state. Organised by the European Parliament Liaison Office in Malta and the Arts Council, the weekend pop-up is modest in budget (€75,000) but already gigantic in local chatter, with all 3,200 free tickets snapped up in 72 hours.

The line-up is deliberately eclectic: a Lithuanian anime about bee-keeping, a Portuguese black-and-white drama set in a shuttered Lisbon kiosk, a Finnish documentary on queer saunas, and—curated as the Maltese slot—Alex Camilleri’s “Luzzu”, the Sundance-hit fiction that cast real Marsaxlokk fishermen as themselves. When protagonist Jesmark Scicluna appeared for Saturday’s Q&A, the audience erupted as if the national football team had scored.

Culture Minister Owen Bonnici called the event “a cinematic bridge between our islands and the continent that funds half our restoration projects,” while European Parliament Vice-President Roberta Metsola told viewers, “Every ticket you hold is a ballot for storytelling without borders.” Yet the political soundbites felt secondary to the ground-level electricity crackling through Strait Street, where projectionists wired a 12-metre inflatable screen between two baroque balconies and café owners stayed open past 2 a.m. selling €2 ħobż biż-żejt to late-night cinephiles.

Local impact was visible in the margins. Gozitan NGO “Kinemastik” ran a pop-up workshop teaching secondary-school students how to subtitle films into Maltese; within hours teenagers were hashtagging #TitraMalta on TikTok, crowing about inventing new words for “sauna” and “baguette”. In the merchandise corner, Sliema start-up “Re-Cut” sold tote bags stitched from obsolete 35-mm film prints once destined for landfill—each bag came with a QR code linking to the short film that used to live on those very strips. By Sunday night they had restocked twice.

The economic ripple is already being measured. Valletta 2018 Foundation released preliminary figures showing restaurant revenue up 28 % on the same June weekend in 2019, while AirBnB occupancy in the capital hit 94 %. But the intangible dividend matters more. “For years Maltese audiences only saw European cinema on Netflix thumbnails,” says film lecturer Dr. Ruth Bianco. “Watching a Croatian mother-daughter drama while a sweaty stranger passes you a napkin for your pistachio gelato creates communal memory—something no algorithm can replicate.”

Critics argue the programme still leans too heavily on festival darlings, with only one Maltese entry. “We need braver curators,” insists Marsa-based director Rebecca Cremona. “Give us Romanian films shot by Maltese DOPs or co-productions between Żabbar teens and Slovak animators. That’s the next step.”

Still, for Leah Portelli—who travelled by ferry, bus and shared Bolt to reach every screening—the weekend was a revelation. On Sunday she queued again for a Danish short about a girl who broadcasts her life from a windmill, clutching a notebook already full of storyboards for her own film set in Xlendi. “I thought you had to leave the island to be seen,” she said. “Now I know the island can be the screen.”

As the credits rolled and the inflatable screen deflated like a slow sigh, Strait Street’s neon signs flickered back to normal. But something lingered: the smell of popcorn mixed with sea-salt, the echo of 27 European languages bouncing off limestone, and the quiet certainty that next year’s festival will need a bigger square.