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After the interview with Drunken Angel Films, published in last Sunday’s MaltaNow magazine, we would like to make the following clarifications.
The article put forth the reading that although there’s an admiration for Dario Fo’s ability to speak to a wide range of people, our work does not reflect this. True, The Isle may be too cryptic for most to grasp, but then again, as Jean Pierre stated in the interview, The Isle was made with a specific spectator in mind: the well-educated, culturally-minded, art festival attendee. Moreover (and this I am adding now) we had to keep in mind that the film was commissioned by the Franco-German cultural channel ARTE (in collaboration with Zentropa and ZDF), and so we also had to cater for an audience typically well-versed in various forms of art, especially painting. Whilst we aspire to make films which communicate on different levels to different people, a five-minute film is not the best medium for such an attempt.
The interview gave the wrong impression that Kenneth was involved in the creation of a documentary about the Etnika ensemble. And this in spite of his insistence with interviewer Matthew Vella that he should make no such ascription.
A ‘quote’ purported to be Kenneth’s - “In fact those films we mentioned about Malta are about death and they are a sort of tabula rasa for everything to be kept dead” - does not make sense, let alone portray his thoughts. We never claimed that Maltese short films are generally about death, nor did we hint that they are amateur efforts. We believe that far from being produced “in bursts of Dionysian passion,” a good number of works posit interesting questions of an existentialist nature, and what we had actually said was more along the lines of the following: we were amazed that at a recent screening of Maltese shorts held at the studio of a friend of ours, almost all of the films were about death in some form or other, including The Isle (which, as we mentioned in the interview, is inspired by the Böcklin cycle of The Isle of The Dead), and that this is of interest to us because it seems that Maltese filmmakers, through death, want to wipe clean the Maltese cultural slate, creating a tabula rasa on which we can write our identity anew.
Mr Vella twice mentioned his dislike of our longest film to-date, Genesis. We appreciate his candid opinion. However, we also believe that the interviewer should have balanced his opinion with the facts that we had given him, namely that the film has been invited to festivals in the United States, Italy, Germany, and several Eastern European countries, that the film had received good comments from the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, and that its first screenings were endorsed by the Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi.
Kenneth Scicluna, Jean Pierre Magro
Dennis Mahoney
Drunken Angel Films, Paola
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