A Siġġiewi fisherman has described his shock at being honoured for his acting at an international film festival.
Jesmark Scicluna, the star of Maltese film Luzzu, was handed the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award in Acting at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday night.
Judges praised Scicluna for bringing a sense of “mystery” to his eponymous role as Jesmark, a struggling fisherman forced into the black market trade to provide for his wife and newborn baby.
But the 28-year-old told Times of Malta that his successful foray into acting came entirely by chance.
“It was all by luck that I landed this opportunity,” Scicluna said.
Malta film Luzzu shines at Sundance, as lead actor clinches Dramatic Special Award
Maltese fisherman-turned-actor takes Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Special Award
3 February 2021, 9:30am
by Laura Calleja
The film, directed by Alex Camilleri, premiered at the festival over the weekend.
The announcement was made during the awards ceremony Wednesday, hosted by actor and comedian Patton Oswalt, ending the festival’s seven-day run.
Scicluna plays a struggling fisherman, who is forced to turn his back on generations of tradition and risk everything by entering the world of black market fishing to provide for his wife and new-born baby.
Upon receiving the award, Scicluna thanked the director, as well as the casting director, “for taking a leap of faith in me.”
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.