Top row: CODA, Courtesy of Sundance Institute; Summer of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised), photo by Mass Distraction Media; Flee, courtesy of Sundance Institute. Bottom row: Hive, photo by Alexander Bloom; Writing With Fire, courtesy of Sundance Institute; Ma Belle, My Beauty, courtesy of Sundance Institute. Park City, UT After six days and 73 feature films, the 2021 Sundance Film Festival’s Awards Ceremony took place tonight, hosted by actor and comedian Patton Oswalt, with jurors presenting 24 prizes for feature filmmaking and seven for Short Films. Honorees, named in total below, represent new achievements in global independent storytelling. Bold, intimate, and humanizing stories prevailed across categories, with Grand Jury Prizes awarded to
Posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021 by Chris Evangelista
Today, the Golden Globe nominations were announced, and the results were pretty bad! So perhaps we should try to cleanse our palates with the 2021 Sundance Film Festival awards. This year’s Sundance was virtual, and while that experience can’t hold a candle to being on the ground in Park City, the festival organizers deserver lots of credit for putting the fest together in any capacity and running it smoothly. While I found a lot of the films I saw this year to be lacking, there were still plenty of noteworthy titles. Lots of attention was paid to
Luzzu
A sobering sea drama where traditions get tied up in red tape.
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Writer-director Alex Camilleri s debut feature, set on the Mediterranean island of Malta, was produced by filmmaker Ramin Bahrani ( The White Tiger ).
Within the film world, Malta is generally known as a production hub for Hollywood blockbusters, its picturesque shores used as locations on projects ranging from
Game of Thrones to
World War Z to Robert Altman’s
Popeye. (The abandoned set of the latter has been turned into a local tourist attraction known as “Popeye Village.”) And yet, while the Mediterranean island has served as a stand-in for anything from Ancient Rome to Westeros, it’s rare to see Malta playing itself on screen, especially in its native tongue.
Luzzu made history last night after it became the first Maltese film to premiere at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.
While no one was able to watch the film from home, because of a geoblock, the Maltese islands were nonetheless rooting for the film we all can’t wait to see.
The premiere was followed by an insightful Q&A with the cast of the film, Jesmark and David Sciculana, who play two real fishermen, and Michela Farrugia, an local actress.
Lovin Malta spoke to the cast of Luzzu to get a better understanding of the film, its real life message and how real fishermen ended up becoming movie stars.
The Maltese film,
Luzzu, will be premiering on Friday January 29, at the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival.
The screening itself is geo-blocked to the United States, but there will be a live Q&A, featuring the Maltese cast, after the screening, at 10.44pm, which can be watched from across the globe, including Malta.
Luzzu follows the story of Jesmark, a struggling Maltese fisherman who is forced to turn his back on generations of tradition and risk everything by involving himself in black market fishing to provide for his wife and newborn child.
Luzzu’s main cast features Jesmark Scicluna, Michela Farrugia, and David Scicluna.