Malta. A Century of Cinema in the Mediterranean

Sons of the Sea, 1925. A British production. Not a film anyone remembers particularly well, but the first feature to shoot in Malta. That was a hundred years ago.

Since then, the list has grown in ways that first crew could never have imagined. Gladiator. Troy. Munich. Game of Thrones, back when King's Landing still had all its buildings. Robin Williams turned a fishing village in Anchor Bay into Sweethaven for Popeye, and forty years later parts of it are still standing. Ridley Scott has come back more than once. So have others. The island gets under your skin if you work here long enough.

What keeps pulling productions to Malta is hard to reduce to a single thing. The light helps. There is a quality to Mediterranean light that camera operators talk about the way sommeliers talk about terroir. The stone helps too. Valletta, Mdina, the Three Cities. Architecture that reads as ancient Rome or Jerusalem or Victorian London depending on how you frame it. And then there is the water tank at Kalkara, which has been part of some of the biggest water sequences committed to film.

But Malta is not just a period location. That is a misconception worth correcting. Apple TV brought Foundation here and turned the island into an alien water world. Jurassic World came through. World War Z filled the streets with a blockbuster apocalypse. The island plays the past, the present, and the distant future, often in the same week.

Geography matters in this business. Malta is 316 square kilometres. The whole country is smaller than most cities. That means locations that look nothing alike sit close together, and the time you save not travelling between them adds up across a shooting schedule.

Then there is the crew. Decades of international productions have left Malta with something you cannot build quickly: people who know what they are doing. Department heads who have worked studio pictures and independents and long-running television. They have seen most problems before, which means fewer surprises on the day.

None of this happened by accident. It was built across a century, production by production.

In 2023, that history found its own stage. The Mediterrane Film Festival launched in Valletta, organised by the Malta Film Commission. Not a tourism exercise. A real festival, built around the idea that Malta had earned its own conversation in European cinema.

The 2025 edition marked the centenary. The theme was "We Are Film." Over nine days in June, more than 55 films from over 20 countries screened across Valletta and its surrounding sites. Industry masterclasses ran at Fort Ricasoli, a venue that is itself 400 years old. The Golden Bee Awards ceremony took place at Fort Manoel. Guests arrived by boat across the harbour.

A hundred years of cinema. Not bad for a rock in the middle of the Mediterranean.

Salvatore Tirone
Executive Producer, MovieOne Productions