Panel: Where Does a Story Begin? — Turning Heritage & Myth into Stories for Global Screens

Malta has one of the most densely layered historical inheritances on earth. Phoenician, Roman, Arab, Norman, Hospitaller, French, British, European - each has left material, linguistic, and cultural residue that is still visible and still contested. The Siege of Malta. The Knights of St John. The prehistoric temples of Mnajdra and Ġgantija. The wartime George Cross. The Inquisitor’s Palace. The witchcraft trials of Birgu. The dark alleys of Valletta and Mdina. These are not merely heritage assets. They are narrative raw material of extraordinary depth and global resonance - most of which remains dramatically underexplored on screen.

This session asks the question that matters most for anyone trying to unlock that material: how do you turn heritage and Myth into stories that reach people? Not how do you preserve it, not how do you archive it - but how do you find the human drama inside a ship’s log or a court record or a fragment of oral tradition, shape it into something an audience will find compelling, and then get it out into the world across the formats and platforms where contemporary audiences actually live?

The practitioners on this panel do exactly that, at very different scales and in very different forms. One has made Norwegian folklore into Paramount horror films seen by millions. One has spent years extracting the darkest, strangest, most compelling stories from Maltese archives and telling them to live audiences on the streets of Valletta, Mdina, Senglea, and Birgu. And one brings the rigour of a historian and the experience of a television producer - with credits ranging from prestige cultural programmes to entertainment and sport - to the challenge of turning research into screen narrative. The moderator has built a career at the intersection of historical scholarship and public storytelling. Together they cover the pipeline from archive to screen: from the Maltese stories that haven’t been told yet to the cinematic language that makes them travel.

The central question is not whether Malta’s past is interesting. It demonstrably is. The question is what it takes to transform that past into stories that travel - creatively, practically, and on Malta’s own terms rather than as a backdrop for other people’s narratives.