Short film mourns the old bus service

When all is said and done, how many of us genuinely miss the old bus service? Despite the Arriva reform's many ups and downs - from route and timetable related nightmares to unfulfilled promises all round - you'd probably be hard pressed to find all that many people with a genuine sense of nostalgia for the heavily polluted and rickety yellow buses that used to hold dominion over our streets until July of last year.

But against all odds, a triad of filmmakers have put together a 15-minute documentary on the twilight days of the old buses. And it's beautiful.

The short, Bus Terminus - by Emma Mattei, Duncan Bone and Harry Malt - first premiered at this year's edition of the Kinemastik Short Film Festival, and will be shown tonight at St James Cavalier at 6.00pm.

Audiences at the Kinemastik Festival responded with warm applause to the bittersweet elegy to Malta's trademark - if much-maligned - old service. And it's easy to see why. Buttressed by interviews with drivers, a bus mechanic and - intriguingly - the man behind the yellow buses' distinctive striping design (or 'tberfil') Bus Terminus manages to pack quite an emotional cocktail in its brief running time - largely because it has a human story at its core.

And as she talks about the project, Mattei emphasises the importance of having "three characters" to hold the film together.

"The first one, Grezzju Borg, is an owner of many buses. I had been in contact with 10 years earlier, when I was looking for Joey tat-tberfil (striping). I had almost forgotten about him when one of his buses went by as Duncan, Harry and I were having our initial brainstorm, eating Lebanese food along the Gzira front. It was a small eureka moment - I saw the 'Tal-Watt' painted on the back of the bus and suddenly we were driving to Tarxien to find Grezzju," Mattei says, adding that it wasn't all that difficult to get their interviewees to open up on camera.

Without this human touch, perhaps the temptation to slip into "Maltese bus clichés" - "we didn't want to make a film that praised or denigrated the system" - would have been even stronger.

According to Mattei, the cosmopolitan outlook of the trio was another factor that helped them be more objective about their subject and focus on the things that really mattered. To wit, while Emma Mattei is a Maltese national (and currently working on the island too), Harry Malt is a British-born illustrator currently residing here while Duncan Bone is a Maltese creative director who lives and works in London.

The idea for the film was actually first proposed by Malt, who visited Malta six months before the Arriva changeover and "expressed an interest in making a film about the buses before they were gone".

"Somehow we got together one week in April and just made the film. It also happened to be the first phase of the city gate demolition so we had a perfect visual metaphor taking place before our eyes.

"Being a Maltese person living in London, Duncan was a perfect 'eye' for a story like this, and Harry's 'outsider' view was actually a help in keeping the story clear in our minds, to document without bias, to tell a story about loss and the inevitability of change..."

The film will be shown at the St James Cavalier Cinema, Valletta at 6.00pm. Entrance to the screening is free.