How Alex Camilleri found his Nenu, and stayed in Malta

Alex Camilleri began writing Żejtune just after leaving New York City and moving to Malta, temporarily, or so he thought.

“I didn't quite live anywhere, and for the first time in my life, I was starting to feel a strong desire to find a home, or at least to have a sense of one,” he tells me as I catch up with him in the middle of an election campaign.

He grew up in the American Midwest to parents who had emigrated from Malta, and questions about identity and belonging had followed him his whole life.

“Throughout my life, I’ve always wondered where the Maltese belong. If there are so many Maltese not living in Malta, how do you define home? Can we still call ourselves Maltese without the islands themselves?”

He had intended to develop the film and return to New York. It did not work out that way. “I thought I would develop the film, then go back to my real life. And then I realised that real life didn't exist anymore.”

The idea

At the same time as his move, he had developed a fascination with għana, spending long nights with singers and guitarists, absorbing their music and observing their world.

“It struck me that I could explore my own questions of belonging through this musical tradition, which seems so rich with history and artistry. And it also seems so unexplored.”

The fact that għana was rooted in Malta’s agrarian history gave him confidence he was on the right track.

“I could combine a film that would be about land and music, and that’s ultimately the film that I made.”

Alex Camilleri (Photo: Lisa Attard)

Żejtun

His research led him to Żejtun, where so much of the musical culture is historically tied, and where he found himself welcomed more quickly than he had expected.

“I remember going to a bar in Żejtun, early on, and I stepped inside, and before I knew it, there was a glass of whiskey in my hand. I was placed in the front seat to listen and learn. And I think that meant a lot to the folks who were performing, and they wanted to make me feel welcome.”

That warmth is something he tried to carry into the film itself, to give audiences a sense of being swept up into a colourful, friendly world of music.

The town also gave the film its name and its unusual spelling. Adding an E to Żejtun was deliberate.

“I wanted the film to be about a place, and the name Żejtun just stuck in my ear. It was just a beautiful name, and I loved the sound of it. And I thought, if you add an E to the end of it, at least for English speakers, you might see the word tune. In one word I would have what I wanted the film to be about—place and music.”

Finding Nenu

A film about għana required a real għannej at its centre. Not an actor who could approximate one, but someone who had lived inside the tradition.

“In the case of a traditional folk singer, there is a technical element to the performance that would be very, very difficult for an actor to simulate,” Camilleri says.

He asked Nenu Borg to commit two or three years of his life to the project.

“It’s an extraordinary thing to ask someone in their 80s to dedicate that kind of time to you. He brought not only his love and dedication to għana, but an incredible amount of mental commitment and emotional fortitude. Such bravery.”

The commitment involved Borg’s family too. Early on, Camilleri spoke to Nenu’s wife, Mary, and his daughters, Helen and Teresa, to explain what was coming.

“They wanted to see him succeed, and they ended up being really instrumental parts of this whole process,” he recounts.

The character became far richer than anything he could have written from scratch.

“Nenu surprised me again and again, and led me to a more authentic and more rewarding version of that character,” Camilleri says.

Making a film in Malta

Żejtune was five years in the making and the challenges of producing it were significant.

“Films have to exist in a global ecosystem. A low-budget personal film, in a language spoken by so few people globally, with no established actors; those are obstacles,” Camilleri says, but he preferred to see them as opportunities.

“We have a chance to reveal a world through cinema that so few people have ever seen. Through Nenu and through the story we’ve constructed, we’re able to open a window onto a folk tradition very few people know about, but one that’s instantly captivating,” he says.

Camilleri says the early international response has confirmed what he hoped for.

“Anyone who has ever thought about leaving their hometown can relate to this. Even if you’ve ever thought about moving out of your house, or your town, I think Żejtune is tapping into quite universal elements,” he says.

The choice to remain in Malta felt, he adds, in some ways inevitable.

“How could you be someone like me, growing up in the Midwest in America, with parents who came from this very special place, and not be inspired by it? And then to grow up to be a filmmaker, how could you not want to tell stories about Malta?”

New York, for all its scale, did not feel like where the work needed to happen, although Camilleri lived there for over a decade. “It always felt to me that New York didn't necessarily need any more filmmakers,” he says. “That the place where I could maybe contribute something new would be to explore the country of my origins, and bring a perspective to it that had been missing.”