Encountering familiar places and people in images; paintings, photographs, adverts, on screen, or in any format, always catches our attention. We are invariably drawn to what we know and understand, and it is from seeing the familiar that our experiences may be enhanced, if not completely altered. Being frequently exposed to American TV and cinema, daily viewing habits are constituted of spaces, accents, manners of speech, attitudes, historical happenings, and fashions that are divorced from our everyday lives.

This is what some of Malta's first cinema enthusiasts who expressed their views in a short-lived publication called Malta Kinema (1931) wanted to address. For the country to progress, a local film industry was needed for both economic and cultural reasons. Notwithstanding the giant leaps made in the last couple of years, especially with the introduction of the Valletta Film Festival, locally-produced cinema is still lacking.

For the past few years I have been following the development of Chris Zarb, a young talented filmmaker who has been making a name for himself internationally. There are three aspects of his short films and his first feature-length Do Re Mi Fa that make them appealing, complex, and introspective. The first is his ability to tell stories that are tragic and forlorn with a tinge of sarcasm and humour. The human condition is always the subject of his scripts and each story evokes a strong sense of loneliness and incompleteness. Zarb conveys this depth of emotion in all aspects of his films; story, settings, colour schemes, props, even the paintings hanging on the walls. All scenes are designed meticulously to reflect the character and the psychological meanderings of each central personality. The third element is exploration of the familiar and local to question life's larger questions; death, mental illness, inner conflicts and other subjects. Most of his films have been shot here in Malta in places that we all recognise.

This aspect helps the audience to identify with the conundrums of the featured personages because their experiences are rooted in the same context as all those who were born or have lived in Malta. Zarb exploits his context to penetrate into the social and psychological depths of each character.

In his latest short film, The Last Grain, an aged man living alone in a large house after the death of his wife carries out mundane tasks in the company of his faithful dog. Every shot conveys the boredom and loneliness of a man whose solitude is emphasised by each interconnected scene, by the accompanying sounds, and his lethargic demeanour. Zarb paid acute attention to all visual details. He engages the viewer to look and observe all components that describe the feelings and thoughts of the protagonist William Bailey, played by Matthew Scurfield.

The Last Grain recently won the Award of Excellence at the Best Shorts Film Festival in the US  and was given special mention by critics. In 2015, another short film called Insanity won the Award of Merit at the same festival. Zarb's feature film Do Re Mi Fa, an intense story interconnecting the disturbed lives of four different characters, was selected to be screened as part of the Panorama Europe Film Festival's programme in New York City and was given the award of Best Cinema of the Absurd and was also selected as one of the top three films of the entire festival. Do Re Mi Fa was part of the official selection of the 33rd Alexandria Film Festival for Mediterranean Countries.

For the 2018 programme of events, the Strada Stretta Concept has invited Zarb to show Do Re Mi Fa to a local audience. A selection of his short films were screened in 2015 at one of the first events organised by Strada Stretta Concept,a project which falls under the auspices of the Valletta 2018 Foundation.

There is an interesting covert link between the subjects of Zarb's films and the history of Strait Street. The latter was home to the marginalised who lived alternative lives to the status quo. The inhabitants of these areas were surrounded by alcoholics, barmaids, cabaret performers, drag queens, and all sorts of colourful characters who have been immortalised in the late nineteenth-century paintings of Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and their contemporaries. It was not until the post-war years that Antoine Camilleri depicted these subjects who have remained on the periphery of Maltese art and history.

Zarb's marginalised are of a different sort whose issues relate to the twenty-first century context, local and global. He touches upon subjects that are rarely discussed openly but that many struggle with on a daily basis. Dissatisfaction, sexual urges, public image, confused or obscure moral directions, indecision, desires, mental illness, disabilities, the list goes on. The director cleverly enters into these delicate subjects by visually evoking their nature. The content of his films is clear but it is through his visual sensitivity that we may perceive and feel the complexities of other people's' troubles. The four protagonist roles were played by Paul Flanagan, Irene Christ, Sean O'Neil and Marc Cabourdin.

All this is presented in the Maltese cultural context which we are not used to experiencing in film, another link to Strait Street's history as one which we do not encounter in official history books and in educational or academic settings. The popular representation of Strait Street on TV and in the media is an obfuscation of the social and political significance of this space. It can be, for some, a difficult history to confront because it sharply veers off from the normal trajectory of rural identity. Strait Street was a cosmopolitan region within the larger provincial spectrum. Zarb's films can likewise present a challenge to the viewing public because of their visual strength, but mainly because they show that which is not often seen.

Cinema and all the visual arts must challenge the familiar, revise it and re-present it in order for us to remain aware of ourselves and our cultural place in time. The Strada Stretta Concept has been an incubator for the experimental since its inception, dissecting and rearticulating art forms and their content. Zarb's films reveal a self-consciousness that evinces a particular maturity. These aspects are what make the recent blossoming of cultural activity relevant and long-lasting.