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15 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 3 MAY 2026 FEATURE Camilleri found his Nenu, and stayed in Malta name and its unusual spelling. Adding an E to Żejtun was delib- erate. "I wanted the film to be about a place, and the name Żejtun just stuck in my ear. It was just a beautiful name, and I loved the sound of it. And I thought, if you add an E to the end of it, at least for English speakers, you might see the word tune. In one word I would have what I wanted the film to be about—place and mu- sic." Finding Nenu A film about għana required a real għannej at its centre. Not an actor who could approximate one, but someone who had lived inside the tradition. "In the case of a traditional folk singer, there is a technical ele- ment to the performance that would be very, very difficult for an actor to simulate," Camilleri says. He asked Nenu Borg to commit two or three years of his life to the project. "It's an extraordinary thing to ask someone in their 80s to ded- icate that kind of time to you. He brought not only his love and dedication to għana, but an incredible amount of mental commitment and emotional for- titude. Such bravery." The commitment involved Borg's family too. Early on, Camilleri spoke to Nenu's wife, Mary, and his daughters, Helen and Teresa, to explain what was coming. "They wanted to see him suc- ceed, and they ended up being really instrumental parts of this whole process," he recounts. The character became far rich- er than anything he could have written from scratch. "Nenu surprised me again and again, and led me to a more au- thentic and more rewarding ver- sion of that character," Camilleri says. Making a film in Malta Żejtune was five years in the making and the challenges of producing it were significant. "Films have to exist in a global ecosystem. A low-budget per- sonal film, in a language spoken by so few people globally, with no established actors; those are obstacles," Camilleri says, but he preferred to see them as oppor- tunities. "We have a chance to reveal a world through cinema that so few people have ever seen. Through Nenu and through the story we've constructed, we're able to open a window onto a folk tradition very few people know about, but one that's in- stantly captivating," he says. Camilleri says the early inter- national response has confirmed what he hoped for. "Anyone who has ever thought about leaving their hometown can relate to this. Even if you've ever thought about moving out of your house, or your town, I think Żejtune is tapping into quite universal elements," he says. The choice to remain in Malta felt, he adds, in some ways inev- itable. "How could you be someone like me, growing up in the Mid- west in America, with parents who came from this very special place, and not be inspired by it? And then to grow up to be a film- maker, how could you not want to tell stories about Malta?" New York, for all its scale, did not feel like where the work need- ed to happen, although Camilleri lived there for over a decade. "It always felt to me that New York didn't necessarily need any more filmmakers," he says. "That the place where I could maybe con- tribute something new would be to explore the country of my ori- gins, and bring a perspective to it that had been missing." Nenu (Photo: Solari Productions Ltd) Photo: Solari Productions Ltd) Photo: Solari Productions Ltd) Alex Camilleri (Photo: Mark Cassar)