I watched the premiere of Żafżifa on Workers’ Day and I was still thinking about it today (May 15th). I am thinking about the unresolved stories, and how Malta itself feels perpetually unresolved. About the way light bounces off limestone here, turning even overdevelopment cinematic for a moment. As I write this article, I text a friend asking if they want to watch it again in Gozo. Before that, I call Australian-Maltese director Peter Sant to speak about the film.

Shot on 16mm with open sets and non-actors, Żafżifa follows Dimitrios, a man returning to Buġibba only to find himself alienated by the relentless pace of “progress” reshaping the island around him. 

The film premiered at the Cairo International Film Festival and unfolds as a portrait of displacement, yearning, and emotional collapse within a rapidly transforming Malta.

“The idea of progress was central to the film,” Mr Sant tells me. “This belief in an upward trajectory toward a future somehow better than the present was something I wanted to explore.”

Mr Sant began developing the film while regularly staying near Buġibba over the last decade. He watched as the area shifted under the pressures of construction, tourism, and economic expansion. “You’d hear construction and demolition everywhere,” he says in the press kit interview. “Traditional terraced houses were being replaced by apartment blocks and international food stores catering to the increasing population.”

What makes Żafżifa so affecting is the tension between fiction and documentary. Conversations feel overheard rather than performed. Characters drift in and out of the story with the unpredictability of real life. Mr Sant attributes much of this to his process: working with non-actors, improvisation, and open sets.

“I’m really interested in removing authorship from the work,” he tells WhosWho.mt. “Letting things happen naturally and collaboratively, instead of micro-managing every movement.”

Many scenes emerged directly from lived encounters. A confrontation in a chicken shop was recreated from something Mr Sant witnessed while location scouting. Dimitrios’ apartment in the film is his actual flat. Some cast members speak in their own languages, often improvising around themes rather than fixed dialogue.

“That openness gives the film its vibrancy,” Mr Sant explains. “You feel like you’re overhearing people rather than watching scenes being performed.”

The film’s refusal to offer resolution feels deeply tied to Malta itself. Crane-filled skylines, yoga classes beside construction sites, and endless apartment blocks become symptoms of a larger uncertainty around what “progress” actually means. Is progress always positive? Is it neutral?

“This progress isn’t necessarily good,” Mr Sant says. “It’s presented as an upward trajectory, but is it?”

The decision to shoot on 16mm intensifies this tension. Mr Sant describes film as naturally carrying a relationship to the past, creating friction with the film’s concerns about modernity and development. The texture of the medium transforms Malta’s harsh sunlight into something tactile and unstable. Reflections bounce off apartment windows like liquid metal. The sea becomes both escape and threat.

“There’s something about how sound and light reflect off the stone here,” he says. “The sound of the sea always seems closer than it is.”

Even the title arrived through an image. Żafżifa is an obscure Maltese word describing the sound of liquid or air oozing through an opening. Mr Sant connects it to a scene where a deflating bouncy castle slowly reveals a church behind it - an image that captures the film’s atmosphere of collapse, exposure, and uneasy revelation.

By the end of our conversation, I realise the film lingers for the same reason Malta lingers - nothing fully resolves. People drift through lives shaped by forces larger than themselves, and there are no happy endings, except moments of connection. Żafżifa captures that condition with rare sensitivity, never reducing its characters to symbols or victims, but allowing them to exist within the contradictions of contemporary Malta.

Watch Żafżifa in cinemas in Malta and Gozo.