Here’s another World Dramatic competition highlight from this past month’s Sundance Film Festival. A film filled with humanism, “Luzzu” is directed by Alex Camilleri, who used his years of life experience with Maltese fishermen to not just make a movie about them, but to also cast these non-professionals as his actors.
The result is a neorealist triumph as Camilleri focuses his lens on Jesmark, a Maltese fisherman, whose life goes spiraling out of control after he spots a leak in his wooden luzzu boat. The repairs are pricey, and it doesn’t help that he’s barely making ends meet, having an unhealthy newborn whose medical bills keep accumulating. Jesmark’s desperation thrusts him out into an the illicit fishing black-market where politics and dirty cash go hand in hand.
“Luzzu” is the kind of film Roberto Rossellini would have made if he were still alive today; ordinary, working-class people being pushed to the brink by an ever-changing and eco-centred globalist world. Lawmakers, who couldn’t care less about the workers featured in “Luzzu,” destroying the livelihoods of these fishermen just to make a quick buck. You feel Jesmark’s struggle, as he tries to hang onto a family tradition while, at the same time, fighting a system already rigged against him.
SCORE: B+