The actor David Walliams, who is being paid at least €300,000 every time he comes to Malta to recite a couple of lines at publicly-funded events by the Film Commission, said during the Film Festival that he slept with Film Commissioner Johann Grech because it is the best way to get everything you need to make a movie in Malta.
The Film Festival cost around €5 million to set up and the Film Commission has been regularly accused of excessive misspending. This accusation is however a rather polite way of describing the situation.
In reality, the Film Commission is being run like the private entertainment company for government politicians which doesn’t even have a productive function in the public-cultural sphere because it is not what it enables and attracts foreign companies to come to Malta to produce their films. The Film Commission supposedly serves to promote Malta’s tax incentives to the film industry – something which is already well known in the film industry because it only takes simple preparatory budgetary work for a movie to understand this.
Pubic funds are being used in a lavish and unscrupulous way to entertain a couple of individuals in the government, including Johann Grech himself, embarrassing our nation and our culture industries in the process. The situation is really out of control.
Indeed, there were even suggestions in the past whether the Film Commission should continue to exist as a separate entity, or whether it should instead be incorporated as a department within the Arts Council. This is because the Film Commission is mostly serving as a marketing department for Malta’s tax incentives to the film industry, which are already well known by most of the major producers and financiers across the industry and in the US.
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