Jason Micallef slams film festival budget: '€5m could buy us 20 NYE events'

The Mediterrane Film Festival’s lavish €5 million budget has been targeted for criticism by Valletta Cultural Agency boss Jason Micallef.

“With €5 million in public funding we could hold 20 consecutive New Year’s Eve events in Valletta and two consecutive Isle of MTV concerts,” Micallef wrote on Facebook.

As chairman of the Valletta Cultural Agency, Micallef is responsible for organising most events on the capital city’s social calendar, including New Year’s Eve celebrations, which are co-organised with a private events firm.

Last year’s New Year’s Eve celebrations attracted roughly 60,000 people to Valletta.

Micallef posted his remark hours after Times of Malta exclusively revealed that this year’s edition of the Mediterrane Film Festival cost €5 million to put on, with VIPs flown in by private jet and guests put up in high-end hotels.

Malta Film Commissioner Johann Grech defended the expense by saying it was roughly similar to the amount spent on the festival in 2024. Grech had initially said the 2024 edition cost €3.9 million and has not explained the budget discrepancy.

A report by auditors RSM and commissioned by Grech highlighted the festival's estimated €7 million total economic impact but also noted that direct contributions to the economy were a more modest €1.4 million, rising to €2.5 million when indirect and induced impacts were factored in.  

Micallef’s oblique criticism of the festival’s €5 million budget indicates a level of disagreement within the Labour Party's top echelons over Grech's ostentatious form of management. 

Apart from leading the VCA, Micallef is also the party's special delegate for implementing its electoral manifesto. Grech, on the other hand, is a key campaign organiser for the party and has played a key role in organising Labour's most recent electoral campaigns. 

Micallef joins an ever-growing list of critics of the Malta Film Commission-run event.

Local filmmakers have complained about being frozen out of the festival, which instead promoted various foreign productions, and noted that local crew members who worked on previous editions of the festival went months without getting paid.

Questions have also been raised about the Film Commission hiring UK comedian David Walliams as a show host for a fourth consecutive year. Walliams made a joking reference to Grech's power during the award ceremony, jesting that film makers had to "sleep with" the film commissioner to get ahead. 

"I have, and I highly recommend it," he told the audience.

Walliams was paid €120,000 to host the 2022 Malta Film Awards and brought back in 2023, 2024 and this year as host of its successor event, the Mediterrane Film Festival. It is not known how much Walliams was paid to host those events.

A 2024 report by the National Audit Office concluded that the Malta Film Commission was “largely successful in attracting film producers” to Malta but expressed concern about the outsized decision-making power afforded to film commissioner Johann Grech and the lack of proper audit trails to document spending by the commission.

That year, Grech also earned a rebuke from his then-minister Clayton Bartolo for having appeared in a short film aired at the 2024 edition of the Mediterrane Film Festival. 

Later that year, the film commissioner again made headlines when he shared an edited clip of Hollywood director Ridley Scott talking about Malta on his Facebook page. 

The clip left out a section in which Scott told a live audience that he would not go to Malta on holiday. 

This year's film festival has led to positive headlines in leading industry publications, however, with The Hollywood Reporter carrying an interview with Grech, headlined 'Why everyone is talking about Malta right now'.