‘Sriep’ trailer gets higher rating than Hollywood blockbusters

The Maltese film classification board has rated the trailer for the movie A Vipers’ Pit, the adaptation 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 questioning 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 taken lightly, whether one agrees or not with his policies or what she writes,” the film board told director Martin Bonnici of their motivation 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 trailer itself seems out of place with the general way we classify other material. There’s no adult content... yes, the theme of the film is a hard one, but 12-year-olds have seen much harder, even more violent 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 classifying 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 content presents.”

Set in 1984 and 2012, the film treads the line between political thriller and family drama as it takes a hard look at the decades-old relationships between big business and politics in Malta, a combination that can lead to deadly consequences. At its centre is a fictional assassination attempt on former prime minister Dom Mintoff's life and the impact the conspiracy has on an inter-generational web of characters.

The film was funded through a collaboration between the National Book Council, Shadeena Entertainment Ltd and Splash Screen Entertainment. Spearheaded by Shadeena Entertainment’s Martin Bonnici, the project was the winner of the inaugural NBC Film Adaptation Fund in 2019.

The production brought together over 50 talented artists and technicians from Malta with the support of a number of Cypriot talents. With a budget of approximately €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.