Growing up, I was always fascinated with storytelling.
It is one of the first things we learn to appreciate. Our parents reading us a bedtime story; watching your favourite cartoon; hearing a funny story from a friend.
What fascinated me was the idea that one human being could captivate an audience by telling a story. It doesn’t matter whether the story itself is real or imagined, whether it’s a joke or a horrifying cautionary tale, or even whether we like whoever’s telling the story. A good story is a good story. Tell it, and at least one person will sit at the campfire, eagerly lapping up every detail.
After lots of encouragement from teachers, friends, family, and peers, writing very quickly became my storytelling avenue of choice. I played around with every format I could grasp – poetry, music, articles and blog posts, even books and film scripts.
Journalism gave my writing a sense of professional purpose. I wasn’t just an angry, rebellious kid who spilled his guts out through ink and paper anymore. I was now a writer, focused solely on chronicling the unfettered greed that brought a sovereign nation to its knees.
It’s now been just over four years since the very first moment in which I got to finally wear the storyteller’s mantle.
If any one of you reading this came up to me in 2020 and said ‘you’ll be running your own portal and publishing your first feature film by 2024,’ I most certainly would have assumed you’ve either lost your mind or must be trying to get into my pants through flattery.
Wearing this mantle – as heavy as it may be on most days – is a privilege which I’ve cherished with every story I published, irrespective of whether it was a simple 500-word piece or whether it was a sprawling feature published on several platforms.
It is for this reason that I feel immense pride at the thought of getting to tell the story of my country through ‘UNTANGLING THE MAFIA STATE’, a feature film which I produced in collaboration with my wonderful colleague, Michael Kaden for NEWZ.mt.
Together with Michael and the members of a joint committee of Repubblika and Occupy Justice Malta activists who supported the production of this project, we took a swing at an ambitious premise: what happened in the seven years since Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by the mafia state?
This film is our humble contribution to the debate which seeks to unravel the implications of all this.
It is the most important story I’ve ever told yet, and I hope we’ve done justice to the giant on whose shoulders we stand on as the crowd tries to anticipate the next act of this tale.
Daphne – we are forever indebted to you. We will never forget your stories, nor the witty, enthralling way in which you told them.
And while I hope her soul may rest in peace, I sincerely hope the souls of those who encounter this film do not.
I hope the moral of this story creeps up on you like an evening chill, forcing you to acknowledge that acting like our home country isn’t a corrupt sinkhole is simply no longer an option.
Silence cannot withstand the deafening loudness of the truth.
