Panel: How a Place Becomes a Story - The Craft of Location Management
- Date
- Saturday 27 June 2026
- Time
- 14:30 – 16:00
- Location
- Mediterrane Festival Hub Room M1, 113 Archbishop St, Valletta VLT1444
On 1 July 2026 - five days after this panel - Enola Holmes 3 premieres globally on Netflix. The film is set in Malta. It was shot in Malta. Its streets, its architecture, its harbours, its light are the world that Millie Bobby Brown’s detective navigates in what Netflix calls her most complex and dangerous case yet. Four location management professionals - including two who put Malta on that global screen - are in this room today.
The location manager is one of the screen industry’s most misunderstood roles. The end credits move fast. The job description sounds logistical. What it actually is - at the level practised by the people on this panel - is a creative act of the first order: the ability to read a script and understand what it needs physically, to know a territory so well that you can find within it the exact corner, the exact street, the exact quality of light that makes a fictional world feel real, and then to solve, with diplomacy and ingenuity, every practical problem that stands between that vision and the camera. The location manager is the person who finds the world the film lives in.
The three location managers on this panel have found worlds for some of the most watched films and series in the history of cinema. Tom Howard has turned the streets of Hull into Victorian London for Enola Holmes, scouted Malta for Enola Holmes 3, and built locations for The Night Manager, The Secret Garden, and a career’s worth of productions that required him to find places that had never been filmed before. John Rakich has spent 25 years as a Supervising Location Manager and Scout across studio and streaming productions including See (Apple TV+) and American Gods, and for five years led the Location Managers Guild International as its President - the institutional voice of the profession globally. Joseph Formosa Randon is the Maltese location professional who made Enola Holmes 3 possible from the ground up - the person who knows every street, every permission conversation, every logistical challenge that had to be solved for Malta to become the world the film required.
For Malta, this session is specifically timely. Enola Holmes 3 is the largest international production to have used Malta as its primary setting rather than its service backdrop. It arrives in the world on 1 July. What the Maltese screen industry - its producers, its film commission, its emerging location professionals, and its institutional stakeholders - needs to understand now is what that production required, what Malta offered that made it the right choice, what the experience of shooting here was like from inside the locations department, and what needs to be built to ensure that Enola Holmes 3 is the beginning of a pattern rather than an exceptional case.
Speakers
Tom Howard
Supervising Location Manager (UK)
Enola Holmes 3 (2026, Malta) | Enola Holmes 2 (2022) | The Night Manager | The Secret Garden | Catherine, Called Birdy | Taboo
John Rakich
DGCO / LMGI / ATAS Supervising Location Manager & Location Scout
Former President (2021–2026), Location Managers Guild International | See (Apple TV+) | American Gods | Pixels
Joseph Formosa Randon
Lead Unit Manager, Locations (Malta)
Enola Holmes 3 (2026)
Jeremy Grech
Jeremy Grech is one of Malta's most distinctive voices in live storytelling, with several years of experience bringing the island's history, architecture, and culture to life for audiences across theatre and tourism. Throughout his career, he has worked as an actor, writer, director, and licensed tourist guide, moving fluidly between staged productions and immersive, site-specific experiences performed in Malta's most significant historic venues. His extensive portfolio includes Artistic Direction of the Ħolqa International Youth Arts Festival, and writing and performing roles in Valletta Resounds: The Caravaggio Experience, Repubblikgħana, and Mdina Resounds: Echoes of the Silent City — productions staged in some of Malta's most storied locations, including Teatru Manoel, St John's Co-Cathedral, and the historic city of Mdina. He has collaborated with leading Maltese cultural institutions and producing bodies including Teatru Malta and Udjenza. Jeremy has built a reputation for turning real places into compelling narrative experiences, combining a trained understanding of architecture, history, and atmosphere with the performer's craft of pace, character, and audience engagement. As a professional licensed tourist guide, he leads the Grand Tour of Teatru Manoel in character, narrates after-hours performances at St John's Co-Cathedral, and has guided historical tours of the Salina saltpans, uncovering its catacombs, Knights-era fougasse, and chapel for visitors encountering the site for the first time. His work has contributed to a wider public understanding of Malta's heritage sites as living, story-rich destinations rather than static monuments. In addition to his theatre and guiding work, Jeremy brings direct, practical familiarity with screen tourism — the phenomenon by which a film or television production turns a real place into a destination audiences travel specifically to see. His daily experience of guiding visitors through Malta's sites gives him a ground-level understanding of what a destination needs to be ready when that kind of attention arrives, and what is lost when it isn't. Today, Jeremy continues to develop new theatrical and guided experiences across Malta's heritage sites, while advocating for storytelling - on stage, in historic spaces, and now in the screen industry - as central to how the island presents itself to the world.