Panel: Making Films Together - The Mediterranean Model

Malta sits at the centre of one of the most productive and underappreciated co-production geographies in the world. To the north: Italy, France, Southern Europe, and the mechanisms of the European film fund system. To the south and east: Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, the Arab world, and the Gulf. And connecting all of it: the Mediterranean basin itself - a cultural, linguistic, and historical space with a shared relationship to landscape, identity, and storytelling that produces some of the most internationally recognised cinema being made anywhere.

The co-production conversation in smaller European territories tends to default toward the largest and most complex structures: multi-country Eurimages packages, major broadcaster co-financing, six-territory deals that take years to close. That conversation is important. But it is not the most immediately relevant one for a territory at Malta’s stage of development. What Malta needs to understand first is the smaller, more agile, more accessible version of the same practice: how two or three producers from compatible territories build a co-production that works creatively and financially at a modest budget, using the mechanisms that are available right now.

The two producers on this panel made Aïcha together - and are here to account for it from two different positions in the chain. Aïcha, directed by Tunisian filmmaker Mehdi M. Barsaoui and premiering in Venice 2024 Orizzonti, was produced by Habib Attia’s Cinétéléfilms in Tunisia and co-produced by Flaminio Zadra’s Dorje Film in Italy, with additional co-production from France. It is the model this session is built around - not because it is the most ambitious co-production imaginable, but because it is the most relevant: achievable, Mediterranean, built on real relationships, and directly applicable to what Maltese producers could be doing now.

Aïcha (Venice 2024, Orizzonti) is a France-Tunisia-Italy co-production assembled on a modest budget, built on real producer relationships, and sold internationally by The Party Film Sales. It is the most relevant available model for what Maltese producers could be building with their Mediterranean neighbours.

Following the panel “Making Films Together” a screening of Aïcha will take place at The Embassy at 18:30 (Cinema 5):

Aya, in her late twenties, feels trapped in her life with her parents in southern Tunisia, seeing no prospects for change. One day, the minivan she commutes in daily between her town and the hotel where she works crashes, leaving her as the sole survivor. Realising this could be her chance for a fresh start, she flees to Tunis under a new identity, but everything is soon jeopardised when she becomes the main witness to a police blunder.

Directed by Mehdi Barsaoui
123’ | Language: Arabic.