Young Theo is sent on his first trip with his Maltese sea faring family, but things go terribly wrong when the 'Simshar' sinks, leaving the crew stranded in the Mediterranean... Simultaneously, Alex - a medic reluctantly dispatched onto a Turkish Merchant vessel which has rescued a group of stranded African boat people between Malta and Italy - gets stuck on the boat as the countries wage a bureaucratic war over who should take in the migrants... The stories unravel in parallel and culminate tragically when the fishermen are traced down, but by that time there's only one survivor.
Direction
Rebecca Cremona's debut balances two tragedies with surgical precision.
Acting
Adrian Farrugia's Theo ages decades in 105 minutes.
Director
Rebecca Cremona
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The real Simshar sinking of 2008 killed four Maltese fishermen; Cremona spent six years developing this after discovering Malta had no feature film industry.
The parallel structure deliberately mirrors how Maltese and international media cover local tragedies versus migrant deaths—one gets names, the other gets statistics.
MT
