• The programme includes a round table on youth aesthetics led by directors Ka Ki Wong and William Wrubel
• The new Cinema Kids section offers the chance to enjoy the festival as a family with a selection of short films for children

Cinema Jove travels tomorrow, 24 June, to Malta with the premiere of the highly anticipated second feature film by Alex Camilleri, ‘Zejtune’.

After receiving the Special Jury Prize at Sundance with his debut feature, ‘Luzzu’, the Maltese filmmaker returns behind the camera with a co-production between his country, Germany and Qatar, produced by Sol Bondy of One Two Films, responsible for key recent titles such as ‘Holy Spider’ (Ali Abbasi, 2022), ‘Armand’ (Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, 2023) and ‘The Secret Agent’ (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025).

‘Zejtune’ revolves around the return to origins and the resistance to abandoning them. With a strong folkloric component, the film connects tradition, music and territory to build a narrative that resonates strongly with contexts across the Mare Nostrum.

The seed of the project came from a personal experience of the director himself, who, after the death of his grandmother, found an old and imprecise map of the family lands. “It came to me just when I had left New York and was restarting my life in Malta, back on the island my parents had left decades earlier,” Camilleri explains.

The decisive impulse to make the film was the discovery of għana, the Maltese folk singing tradition in which two men improvise poetic rhymes in a bar. Zejtune captures this spirit through the voice of Nenu ‘l-Brazz’ Borg, an 82-year-old master of this art making his screen debut.

Camilleri discovered that young people in his country also join these lively performances, which gave him the confidence to shape a more hopeful story than his debut feature: “Music is immaterial, it lives within us. Therefore, it may survive even the rapid modernisation that seems to be erasing much of Malta’s heritage.”

A round table to move beyond the clichés of coming-of-age stories

The reflection on youth identity will continue with the panel ‘Beyond coming-of-age: the aesthetic keys of youth’. Participants include Hong Kong director Ka Ki Wong alongside actress Elizabeth Tang, creators of the competition film ‘I Heard That They Are Not Going to See Each Other Anymore’, and German filmmaker William Wrubel, author of ‘When We Saw Each Other More Often’, also screened in Cinema Jove’s Official Selection.

The trio will analyse how to portray Generation Z while moving away from genre clichés, instead embracing hybrid languages, spatial design and the importance of silence.

Family-friendly seventh art

In its ongoing commitment to developing new audiences, Cinema Jove premieres tomorrow at the Rialto Theatre the Cinema Kids section in collaboration with Premiers Plans. This initiative stems from a strategic partnership with the French festival Premiers Plans d’Angers, founded in 1989 and a European reference in supporting emerging filmmakers.

During the day, two programmes of short films, mostly created by students and aimed at children aged 3 to 6 and 6 to 9, will be screened.

The selected pieces address friendship, courage, change and the small discoveries that shape growing up. The cycle will also include a Audience Award, where attending children will vote for their favourite works and present the prize during the festival’s closing gala.

Cinema Jove emphasises its commitment to building new audiences through a new collaboration with the French festival Premiers Plans d’Angers, founded in 1989 and a European reference in supporting young talent and emerging directors.

Short filmmakers speak up

The day will conclude with screenings of two selections of international and national short films presented by their directors. The audience will have the opportunity to interact directly with emerging talent.

Local representation will come from Valencian filmmaker Iván Fernández de Córdoba and Alzira-born Joan Vives Lozano. The former explores the phenomenon of ‘riders’ in his documentary ‘Esto está frío’, based on nine months of interviews with dozens of delivery workers and customers to portray labour precarity.

The latter presents in ‘Un buen salvaje’ the disturbing journey of a businessman who, after getting lost in a remote vineyard area, is helped by a group of hunters.

Current affairs enter Cinema Jove with the short film by French directors Benjamin Chevallier and Tristan Lhomme ‘Sans filet’, about a football agent who picks up a promising young Malian goalkeeper at the airport to sign his first professional contract.

From Germany, Kevin Koch presents ‘Mother of a Son’, which explores the painful moral and emotional dilemma faced by a mother torn between unconditional love for her son and the weight of his violent actions.

The transition to adulthood is explored in the Swiss film ‘Nest’, by Stefania Burla, and in the Hungarian animated film by Nikoletta Veress, ‘Each, All and Every’. One is set in a rural environment and questions the representation of female bodies, attraction and sexuality, while the other explores self-acceptance through the journey of a rabbit living in a world of multiple choices.

Finally, Cuban filmmaker Ana A. Alpízar shares with the audience ‘Norheimsund’, an intimate story that addresses the frustrations, disappointments and hopes of a generation raised under the weight of economic scarcity and the inevitable sacrifice of family life in contemporary Cuba.