ŻAFŻIFA
Cairo IFF 2025 (international competition)
Panorama of the European Film 2025 (Egypt)
Panorama of the European Film 2025 (Egypt)
Shot on 16mm with open sets and non-actors, Żafżifa unfolds as an emotional journey of yearning, scepticism, and hope. The stories, shaped not by invention but by lived encounters, build continuously, culminating in an architectural and emotional collapse.
Set in a small and densely populated seaside town in Malta, it paints a corrosive portrait of a man drifting through a world of concrete and steel to discover his friends have taken advantage of the changing economy and moved on with their lives. Tortured by a mysterious past, he unleashes himself from the progress that surrounds him.
Throughout, friends and enemies swim by, failing to puncture his carapace until he meets Annie. She, like him, has a child she never sees; has been disappointed in love; lives in a vacuum, without freedom, without companionship. Brought together by fate and torn apart by circumstance, together they struggle against a barrage of obstacles the gods throw in their path.
Set in a small and densely populated seaside town in Malta, it paints a corrosive portrait of a man drifting through a world of concrete and steel to discover his friends have taken advantage of the changing economy and moved on with their lives. Tortured by a mysterious past, he unleashes himself from the progress that surrounds him.
Throughout, friends and enemies swim by, failing to puncture his carapace until he meets Annie. She, like him, has a child she never sees; has been disappointed in love; lives in a vacuum, without freedom, without companionship. Brought together by fate and torn apart by circumstance, together they struggle against a barrage of obstacles the gods throw in their path.
“Zafzifa is more than social realism; it is an atmospheric, philosophically rich exploration of displacement, poverty, and fractured identity.”
Rana Atef, SEE NEWS
interview excerpt (*)
...I am always intrigued by the sounds I hear on the island. They’re so rich and layered. Kids, vehicles, machinery, the wind and of course the sea. There’s something about how they reflect off the stone buildings; the way the sound of the sea lapping against the rocks always seems closer than it is.
Rob Azzopardi and John Bartolo spent a long time recording foleys, effects, and ambiences on set. I used almost everything those guys did. Then, during post, I spent months recording more. It’s a process I really enjoy. After that, it was back to the studio where I started to put them all together.
My idea for the film was to have the sound gradually separate from the image as it progresses. Sometimes the camera holds still while the sound carries on with the characters. There are moments when we hear voices long before the people appear on screen. And in the penultimate scene, narration enters for the first time. For me, this seemed to resonate with the relationship between Dimitrios and Annie.
And the music?
Most of the soundtrack was recorded before the shoot—not by design, it just happened that way. I was still writing and researching when those recordings were made. They were all improvised, then edited, which is how I usually work with music. The rest grew out of experiments with sounds captured during the shoot—using contact mics, geophones. A lot of these were transferred to reel-to-reel tape, where I’d layer, distort, timestretch, loop, and filter things. Working with tape in this way, I felt it really sat well with the image.
*full interview available via press kit link below
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