All hands on deck for Simshar

Young director Rebecca Cremona is on a mission to put Malta on the international movie map with her upcoming film Simshar. But she is at pains not to have it called a documentary, she tells Bertrand Borg. Rebecca Cremona had barely finished uploading a teaser trailer for her upcoming film Simshar when variations of the same comment started coming in: looks great, but is it truly what happened? Her answer was succinct. “No. But it’s not meant to be.” The 2008 Simshar tragedy, in which four people died in a fishing boat explosion, was only part of Ms Cremona’s cinematic vision. Anyone expecting to see a documentary about the Simshar incident is barking up the wrong tree, she said. “The film is inspired by true events, but we’ve invented some characters and removed others – not because we don’t care about them, but because we had to make it work dramatically.” The story, Ms Cremona explained, runs on three parallel tracks. The traditional Simshar story as most people know it is the first. Life on land, with Simon Bugeja’s wife Sharin raising a family as immigration concerns and tension among fishermen start to bubble, is the second. Third, a Maltese doctor finds himself on board a...