The aim of this thesis is to present the first extensive critical study of screenwriting and storytelling in Maltese television and film. It focuses on two pivotal periods in Malta’s modern history—post-Independence and post-EU accession—and the different ideologies that each period represents.
It investigates a series of connected themes through analyses of particular texts—screenplays, television series, short, and full feature films—written and produced between 1970 and 2020.
While the main objective of this research is to investigate and evaluate Maltese television and film screenplays and their authors using qualitative methodology, the main argument sets out to understand how the island’s past and present socio-political and historical environments (termed as the ‘Maltese condition’) shaped Malta’s screenwriters and writer-directors. The objective is to encourage a critical reflection, mediated through the contextualized image of self-representation, on the steady growth of mature and significant Maltese screen texts (television series, short films, and full feature films). The selection criterion of the screen texts is the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘double storytelling’ technique, namely a personal story about a human condition embedded in a greater context of cultural, political, social, and ethical significance.
Since there is almost no existing work that investigates contemporary Maltese screenwriting the primary data for the present thesis derives from the material written and produced by Maltese screenwriters and writer-directors. In order to compensate for the lack of written secondary material on Maltese screenwriting, the present study also draws extensively on the author’s original interviews with Maltese screenwriters, writer-directors, and film practitioners. This primary source derives from forty-six in-depth semi-structured personal interviews and surveys conducted between 2016 and 2021. Additional data is collected through an open-ended questionnaire, which seeks validation of the main research question. The research also includes speaking to academics from the University of Malta, who also provided supplementary material pertaining to the history of Malta, Maltese culture and language, contemporary and visual arts, media and communications, small islands, anthropology, and sociology. The thesis also looks at Malta as a location that implements the island’s landscape as part of the storytelling narrative. The last Chapter is drawn on my own experiences as a screenwriter and screenwriting educator in Malta and examines The Maltese Fighter in terms of the ‘double storytelling’ technique and production grants. The approach adopted here is practice-based.