Flasz On Film

Sarah Jayne Portelli is an Australian filmmaker of Maltese heritage who one day decided to move to Malta to get in touch with her roots. Which is totally understandable. What she thought was embarking on was a journey of self-discovery and reflective appreciation of what it means to have a home away from home, where she’d be able to immerse herself in the Maltese way of life and maybe point her camera at what she encountered. By her own admission, she did not expect that every time she’d point her camera at something, a cat would enter the frame. And once a cat enters the frame, the law states the camera must focus on the cat and zoom in. I don’t make the rules. The law is the law.  

Seriously, though, Cats of Malta is the result of the filmmaker’s experience in Malta, a home for four hundred thousand people, and just around a one hundred thousand cats, many of which complete street-raised strays. This documentary is an attempt to tell the world a little bit more about this perhaps underreported phenomenon that unsuspecting tourists would like to know ahead of travelling to Malta for their summer break, especially if they are cat lovers. In what looks like a surprisingly polished piece of student filmmaking with more heart than brawn, Sarah Jayne Portelli brings together a whole host of cat enthusiasts, cat lovers, and other “caticionados” to tell their stories – and there are plenty of those in the rather succinct running time of Cats of Malta – about, you guessed it, cats.  

That’s it. That’s the movie.  

So, what I can only say is that if you are not particularly partial to cats, you might as well skip this because Cats of Malta is veritable porn for cat people, with multiple close-ups, wide shots, long zooms, pans and everything else in between where all you get to look at are beautiful and majestic stray cats of Malta. Well, there are people in this documentary too, but I don’t think I can tell you much about what they had to say because the camera would frequently cut to close-ups of cats as they were talking, and I’d immediately stop listening because here-kitty-kitty-pspspspsps. Who’s a good kitty, who’s a good kitty?  

Where was I? Ah, yes. 

So, Cats of Malta digs into these Malta-specific issues where cats have essentially become full-fledged citizens of the country and where the locals have adopted them collectively as parts of their national identity. You’ll hear several interviews with people like you and me, hear how they may have rescued a particular cat, and then the filmmaker would show us that cat. And that cat would look into the lens, purr and squint in a sign of relaxed acknowledgement and here-kitty-kitty-who’s-a-good-kitty I’d completely lose the plot again pspspspspsps because these cats are just too adorable not to give them your full attention. Kissing noises.  

I’m not exaggerating. I have no idea what this movie is about. All I remember is cats cats cats cats pspspspspsps here-kitty-kitty. This is so embarrassing because for once I’d like to look like a semi-serious film reviewer and here I am completely unable to articulate what this documentary touches on, all because some of these cats were so adorable, I could squish them in my arms and never let them go.  

How much is a one-way ticket to Malta? Maybe I could move there and just live among these cats?  

Did I mention I am a massive cat person? 

You know what? Forget it. I can’t give this movie an honest review. It’s a five-star festival of cat porn with half a star deducted on the back of lacklustre staging of talking head interviews and half a star taken off because sometimes the camera would cut away from a cat to focus on a human for a few seconds and I felt personally attacked with these editing decisions. Other than that, Cats of Malta is what the title implies – sixty-eight minutes of catnip for cat lovers with absolutely no value for anybody else. Well, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, because if you can hold your nerve and look past the cats – who am I kidding? Nobody can, right? – you might find the camera captured the everyday vibes of living in Malta, which seems quite relaxed and centred around ingesting solar energy, eating good food, drinking wine and stroking cats, which are just there on benches and pavements. Magical.  

Therefore, if there is anything to be extracted from this movie apart from the simple realization that cats are God’s perfect little killing machines that are also fluffy, cuddly and you just want to caress them, it is that when you go to Malta, you might want to avoid sitting on any brick walls or literally anything that isn’t a park bench. Because some locals have a habit of just pouring cat food out of tins literally everywhere, so you’d better eat your ice cream standing up. Or squatting. And while you’re squatting, you might as well go “pspspspspspspsps” and stroke any cat that responds to your universal feline-charming skills.