Alejandro Amenabar’s Malta-shot Agora had its Malta premiere at the Eden Cinemas on Wednesday to an appreciative audience.

Amenabar’s previous two films, The Sea Inside, which won an Oscar, and The Others, had both been winners. Here is a film which sees him change from intimate close-interiors reflections to a scale almost reaching the full range of epic films such as Ben Hur and the like.

And it is not just because the subject matter is the Classical Age. It is also because the subject matter is nothing if not epic – the clash of civilisations.

The film opens in Alexandria in 391 AD. The streets are boiling with strife and clashes of faith as Christianity gains power, and men like Ammonius (Ashraf Barhom) make grand speeches and perform “miracles” to sway the disenfranchised commoners.

Inside her school, Hypatia, a leading thinker in Rome-governed Alexandria, is considered to be the first notable woman of mathematics. She studied philosophy and astronomy, and both pagan and Christian students from far and wide come together to study under her guidance.

Inside the walls of the Library of Alexandria, Hypatia struggles to extinguish the religious turmoil of her students while also staying free of romantic interest. Her slave Davus (Max Minghella) loves her, but cannot tell her, while her student Orestes takes every chance to make his love for her known – even after being rebuffed by her menstrual rags.

When a Roman is killed during one of Ammonius’s speeches, “proving” his God’s power on hot coals, everything changes, setting off a never-ending stream of desperate violence mixed with overwrought feelings of entitlement. Back and forth, the two sides fight — each is desperate for something, whether that be the Christians’ desire to gain power or the pagans’ desire to keep theirs — and both feel too entitled to make any concessions. The death of the Roman leads to bloody retaliation in the streets, and ultimately, the destruction of the library and the knowledge it contains, as well as the life Hypatia has always known. Even Davus leaves her to join Ammonius.

The second part of the film moves forward many years, and the same battles continue. However, now almost everyone, including prefect Orestes, is Christian. Now the religious turmoil is focused on the Jews, as well as on women and children. Hypatia’s rights and political influence are no longer secure, and this leads to her horrific and heartbreaking end.

Many could consider this an anti-Christian film, but to do so would be utterly over-simplistic and inaccurate. Beyond Hypatia’s desire for all faiths to exist peacefully, no one side is wholly good or bad. Both the pagans and the Christians have their moments of honour – the quests for knowledge for the former, and the feeding and care of the masses for the latter – while also partaking in heinous violence; it is this balance that drives the film.

More than anti-Christian, the film is against any fundamentalism, with a salutary lesson for us all that fundamentalism is not restricted to any one religion or any one time.

However, as in Gore Vidal’s Julian and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, this shows the Classical Age in its best light. Those considered saints by the Catholics (just like the Cappadocians in Vidal’s book) are depicted as uncouth and , at times, even as rabble-rousers.

The interludes — containing shots of the earth from space and subtitles filling in the contextual, historical facts — could make some feel like they are watching three episodes of a miniseries rather than a traditional narrative. The unconventional structure makes sense within the context of the film, which is about taking a larger (historical or cosmological) view of immediate conflicts and meditating on the implications (personal, political, metaphysical) that history has often unfolded cyclically rather than in unchecked, linear progress.

At Cannes, Agora was shown in an out-of-competition slot and is one of Europe’s costliest films this year. It was later presented at the Toronto Film Festival and will have its worldwide release on 19 December (following an earlier release in Spain).

What makes the film riveting is its visuals, from the great vast crowd scenes to the intimate person-to-person scenes. Amenabar decided to build sets and limited his use of Computer Generated Imagery – and the result is a feast for the eyes.

It is also what proves to be the main advantage of choosing Malta to be the film-set. Malta is as much a cross-roads of civilisations as Alexandria was – this is amply proven by the faces and accents of the many Maltese extras who worked on the film. Fort Ricasoli was turned into the centre of Alexandria around the Serapeum and the Library. Other footage was shot down in the Valletta Ditch, with bastion walls on every side and also on the side facing the sea beneath St Elmo.

The film has so many Maltese extras that, as these roll on, you think all Malta took part in it. Actors such as Manuel Cauchi, Harry Borg, Charles Thake, Alan Paris and Charles Sammut have not insignificant parts.

After Gladiator, Troy and Munich, Malta and its Film Commission have added one more honour to their list.