Simshar is an award-winning Maltese drama film that tells the heart-breaking tale of a Maltese fishing family including a young lad, Theo, who is on his first trip, when things go terribly wrong. The crew become stranded at sea after their boat, Simshar, sinks.
Meanwhile, Alex is a medic reluctantly dispatched onto a Turkish merchant vessel which has rescued a group of stranded African boat people between Malta and Italy. He also finds himself stuck at sea as the countries wage a bureaucratic war over who should take in the irregular African migrants crossing from Africa to Europe.
As the stories unravel in parallel, the fate of the fishing family becomes entwined with the saga of the migrants with tragic consequences. The tale culminates tragically when the fishermen are tracked down, but by that time there’s only one survivor.
The narrative is based on a true incident in which four people died before or after an explosion took place aboard a fishing vessel named Simshar on July 11, 2008. Simshar left Marsaxlokk, on July 7 carrying five people – its owner, Simon Bugeja, his father Karmenu Bugeja, his 11-year-old son Theo Bugeja, a Maltese man named Noel Carabott, and a Somali man named Abdulrahman Abdala Gedi. It was expected back four days later but it never returned. It is believed that a blast took place on board on July 11 which destroyed the boat, and the crew survived the blast and drifted for several days on a makeshift raft made of floating debris. However, four of the five died in the days following the incident.
Simshar, the film, was directed and co-written by Rebecca Cremona. Her first feature as writer-director, it toured five continents after its release in 2014. In 2020, Rebecca was awarded the Order of Merit (Midalja għall-Qadi tar-Repubblika) by the President of Malta for her contribution to the island’s cultural sphere.
Simshar is being presented as part of the Queen Mary-Cornell University Spring School on Migration, May 4-9 2025, in Gozo and Malta, an interdisciplinary and cross-institutional event which focuses on the experiences and politics of migration in the Mediterranean, and includes lively discussions, talks, ethnographic walks and cultural explorations.
The screening takes place on Monday 5 May, 6pm, at Queen Mary University of London, Gozo Hospital, Victoria. It is free to attend – prebook your tickets here.
