Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1396480
5 NEWS maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 28 JULY 2021 MATTHEW VELLA THE Maltese film classification board has rated the trailer for the movie A Vipers' Pit, the ad- aptation of Alex Vella Gera's Is- Sriep Reġgħu Saru Velenużi, 15+, a classification that mirrors the film's overall rating but has left director Martin Bonnici ques- tioning its rationale. The film board, chaired by film critic Mario Azzopardi (not the film and theatre director), said that given the trailer and the film is about a plan to kill a politician, both trailer and film needed a mature audience. "Planning to kill a public figure cannot be tak- en lightly, whether one agrees or not with his policies or what she writes," the film board told direc- tor Martin Bonnici of their moti- vation to classify both the trailer as well as the film, at 15+. Bonnici agreed that the film did have a reasonable classification, but questioned whether the same was required for the trailer itself. "Whilst I agree that the film has a reasonable classification as 15+, I think the 15+ rating for the trail- er itself seems out of place with the general way we classify other material. There's no adult con- tent... yes, the theme of the film is a hard one, but 12-year-olds have seen much harder, even more vi- olent things in cinema, maybe of a fantastical nature. But definitely there's nothing in the trailer that should shock," Bonnici said. The film trailer's classification at 15+ could risk compromising the film's commercial prospects, given that films like Black Widow or Fast And Furious 9 are both rated at 12A. That means the trailer for A Vipers' Pit cannot be shown during the screening of those same films. "The question then becomes: are we following hard rules in classification, or are we also clas- sifying the content itself, as in the themes present within the film? That could be more worrying, because then the board could mis-classify things based on their perception of the themes rather than the hard facts that the con- tent presents." Set in 1984 and 2012, the film treads the line between politi- cal thriller and family drama as it takes a hard look at the dec- ades-old relationships between big business and politics in Mal- ta, a combination that can lead to deadly consequences. At its centre is a fictional assassination attempt on former prime min- ister Dom Mintoff's life and the impact the conspiracy has on an inter-generational web of charac- ters. The film was funded through a collaboration between the Na- tional Book Council, Shadeena Entertainment Ltd and Splash Screen Entertainment. Spear- headed by Shadeena Enter- tainment's Martin Bonnici, the project was the winner of the inaugural NBC Film Adaptation Fund in 2019. The production brought to- gether over 50 talented artists and technicians from Malta with the support of a number of Cyp- riot talents. With a budget of ap- proximately €250,000, the film had to make its way through the pandemic, shooting under strict conditions in the summer of 2020 with remote post-production work throughout the Autumn and Winter seasons. 'Sriep' trailer gets higher rating than Hollywood blockbusters At 15+ rating for trailer alone, A Vipers' Pit's plot on fictional attempt to kill Dom Mintoff earns trailer high age classification The film trailer's classification at 15+ could risk compromising the film's commercial prospects, given that films like Black Widow or Fast And Furious 9 are both rated at 12A