A music video for Maltese band Bernie & Pod has won an online contest organised by Aperitivo Corto, Italy’s largest short film platform. The video, directed by Zepp Gauci, was for the song Ħelwa tal-Għaġeb.

Originally released last summer, the music video had originally amassed over 12,000 views on YouTube. However, the contest saw it being reuploaded, this time onto Facebook, by the Italian page. Here, it joined 13 other finalists for Aperitivo Corto’s Music Week, which specifically targets young directors and aims to promote both local and international talent. It gathered nearly 5,000 views in the first 48 hours, instantly catapulting it to second place. It went on to get some 2,000 more views by the end of the week.

The Italian platform announced its winners at the end of last week, where they also announced that some 50,000 people had visited the site and participated in their competition. 

As the final data showed, the Maltese music video beat the rest of the competition in all three categories, attaining a total reach of over 22,000 impressions.

The music video was actually uploaded onto the competition’s database some four whole days after some other videos competing against, but it still managed to edge in front of the pack by the end of the week.

Originally shot on the sister island of Gozo before summer of last year, Ħelwa tal-Għaġeb does not mark the last time that Bernie & Pod and director Zepp Gauci collaborated. In fact, in an announcement made last week, the band announced that they’ll be going back to the studio for “another year of beautiful music videos.”

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David Grech Urpani

Lovin Malta's Head of Content, Dave has been in journalism for the better half of the last decade. Prefers Instagram, but has been known to doomscroll on TikTok. Loves chicken, women's clothes and Kanye West (most of the time).