As they say, its good to look behind and see your own footsteps in the snow or sand. Or lunar surface. People have done it, they ve said some positive things about, so here it is…
We started year the same way we finished the last one, doing a campaign for Deaf and Hard of Hearing association’s struggle to introduce captioning in Maltese cinemas and on TV. This project was helped by the Il-Premju tal Prezident so big thanks to the Prez and the team behind this fund.
This campaign has been a success as most of the cinemas did introduce the captioning but TV stations are still largely unresponsive. If PBS reads ever this blog, hopefully they re clap their hands and say yes, this may be a good idea…
A month later, we hosted Ben Russell and Basma Alsharif, a tall couple of filmmakers who came to Malta to hold a workshop on psychedelic ethnography. Malta Arts Fund gave us a helping hand so this hand we shake it firmly and say thanks. We still await to see their works produced during the residency here. A word excited would be an understatement. Ben Russell made a video during his stay in Malta, for none other than Kentucky’s most charming man(sorry Mike)
All year round, we invited various people to host our film club for a month. Amazing line up included Will Oldham, Jeffrey Lewis, Djinn Carrénard, Dimitrije Vojnov, Basma Alsharif, Violeta Kulewska, Katarzyna Peukert and Auditus Foundation.
Some time in May, Valletta V18 got us side to side with Renzo Spiteri, where we showed Charlie Chaplin’s film “Modern Times” to hundreds of people in Merchant Street in Valletta. We projected it on a mega screen whilst Renzo gave it a sound.
Then we went to Odessa, Ukraine, via Moldova, Romania, Serbia and Macedonia. Arts fund help once again. We went round and round and showed films that were shown at our festival and showed Maltese short films for the first time ever in the history of man kind or any kind for that matter. We re small, they re bigger but love sees no sizes. We thank everyone once again for their warm welcome.
Our Children’s film festival happened for the 4th time. If you re still pondering should you have kids or not, this festival alone is a good enough reason to do it.
In the meantime, grown ups went to our 9th Short Film Fest, that was great but will be much better next year, when we celebrate a decade of existence.
A little later, Jeffrey Lewis and the Rain came to visit us. They played in Hamrun, the city that never sleeps.
There’s an amazing art gang in Novi Sad, Serbia, that have done a wild bunch of critical and subversive actions that have made them into a cultural institution(in a good way). They presented a documentation of their actions in Valletta on October 12th.
Would a proper English allow me to say how privileged was Kinemastik to host one of its own and may i add – what noise he made in British Legion, whilst swiftly adding word epic, never before used here. “A trumpet player trapped in a two dimensional universe” is in fact the unique work of Lucas Abela, a maverick musician with an unhealthy obsession with sheets of broken glass. He was accompanied by Keg De Souza, an artist who designed a Gigloo, for an exhibition Mix Tape, that we hosted at St James.
Happy new year to you all, this is the end of the text, it may have been a drag to read it all but the reward, that has nothing to do with the text above, comes to those who wait.
K I N E M A S T I K 