On my first public screening
It’s quite surreal, but there it is: my 15-minute short documentary RANIERO was screened on TVM, Malta’s national broadcaster, on Friday, the 1st of August, 2025, during the highly coveted Friday night primetime slot.
It’s difficult to estimate how many people actually watched it, but going off the Broadcasting Authority’s latest audience survey, some odd 100,000 viewers usually tune in around 20:00 to 20:30 on Friday nights – the episode of the Malta Short Film Festival that my documentary premiered on started around 20:45.
Shot in two half-days with a budget of zero euros, and with the generosity of Matthew Muscat Drago, Rebecca Anastasi and Raniero Borg, I directed the documentary during the last week of my University course, just as my dissertation and many assignments were being drawn to a close.
My cowardice – or perhaps, as readers of my blog might recognise it, resistance – kept me from looking at the footage for weeks… 30 weeks to be specific. I only started properly logging my footage on Christmas Eve of 2023, and officially started editing it on January 24th.
All in all, it took more than 2 years to get RANIERO the public screening it deserved. That’s a timeline comparable to many big-budget feature films reaching cinema screens… but it got there in the end. Despite it being my first work, I am extremely proud of it – very few people are lucky enough to get to direct their first real project with industry-leading collaborators.
What’s quite sad is that, despite my involvement in many foreign film and TV productions, I haven’t as of yet followed RANIERO up with another personal film project. There’s a real grit that you have to suffer through just to get the smallest of film productions off the ground… and grit is a finite resource.
What do I use it on next?
P.S.: If you missed RANIERO on TVM, you can now watch it anytime on ranierodocumentary.com!
