The first and only time I saw Mario Philip Azzopardi’s Gagga was 35 years ago, on its first night at the university.

As Mr Azzopardi was introducing the film last Saturday, I well remember him telling us, 35 years ago, that the film was going to be the reason why he would be failing his finals. (He did.)

Seeing it again after all these years brought back the emotions the film had stirred up in us, the audience that first night, all those years ago, which made me title my review “Lil din l-art gagga” in

Il-Hajja.

As seen last weekend, the original Super 8 film now digitalised and polished up, still shows signs of the amateur way it was shot all those years ago.

Yet the feel of authenticity it carries is impossible to recreate: the way our streets and buses looked like then, the 1960s home interiors, the people and places it brought back to life and, above all, the cultural clash between the dominating Church-ridden negative outlook on life, with priests, processions, threats of eternal damnation, families built on the home-church-club paradigm on the one side and on the other the new generation of Maltese welcoming the approaching Independence as a declaration of personal independence from all the obscurantism of old.

There they were last Saturday, with some exceptions of course, all 35 years older, from Frans Sammut himself, to Mario Philip Azzopardi, down to two people who had small bit, walk-on, parts, but who since those student days have come along in life and the world, MIA’s Rosette Fenech as (then) a pro-British clerk working in a dingy office in Sliema, and Roger Degiorgio as a good-looking Italian Ciccio Bello chatting up Maltese girls.