Why I Started Scene on Gozo (And Where It’s Going)

Scene on Gozo started because people couldn’t find the Madame Blanc filming locations. Not vague pointers, actual, usable information about where things were and how to get there. I kept meeting visitors who had travelled specifically to find Sainte Victoire and arrived on the island with almost nothing to go on. After hearing about one lady who had travelled from Tasmania especially. If felt like a problem worth solving.

I’d moved to Gozo in July 2021, a few months before the show started airing. We’d been living in Malta since 2019, Covid had arrived not long after we did, which made for a quieter introduction to the island than most people get. When I got a remote role in the summer of 2021, we decided to move somewhere before Malta got busy again. A lot of people suggested Gozo, and even though we’d only visited a few times. We thought we’d try it. We could always move back. That was five years ago.

So when The Madame Blanc Mysteries started airing that October and I started recognising the some of the landmarks that I saw every day, and then started meeting fans who couldn’t find what they were looking for, the site felt like a natural thing to do. What I didn’t expect was where it would lead.

Once I started digging into what had actually been filmed on Gozo, I realised the island had a remarkably rich cinematic history that almost nobody had documented properly. Decades of productions, from Hollywood epics to forgotten British films, had used Gozo as a backdrop and left almost no trace online. So the site shifted. From a Madame Blanc guide into something wider, an attempt to document the full picture.

The research is time-consuming and occasionally maddening. It starts with trawling the internet and the many Malta and Gozo Facebook groups, particularly the Filmed in Malta page, an NGO run by Jean Pierre Borg that is easily the most authoritative resource on the subject and has saved me more dead ends than I can count. It means asking extras, when you live here, you meet people who’ve been on set more often than you’d expect. They tend to have two topics of conversation: what they’ve filmed, and what the catering was like. Both are useful, in their way.

It means tracking down copies of obscure productions that aren’t on any streaming service, watching them with fingers poised to take a screengrab, then trying to work out whether what you’re looking at is actually Gozo and if so, where. Sometimes it’s obvious. The red sand at Ramla Bay is unmistakable. Fungus Rock doesn’t look like anywhere else on earth. But I’ve spent a significant amount of time comparing the interiors of Gozitan churches trying to identify a single location, matching the art or the pattern of floor tiles until something clicked.

Part of the fun is also proving that something wasn’t filmed here. That sounds straightforward until you realise how many sites repeat claims without ever checking them. The Guns of Navarone comes up regularly, listed on various pages and Facebook groups as a Gozo production. The claim is even on the film’s wikipedia page, without a citation. The terrain is similar to Rhodes, where it definitely did shoot, and the claim has been copied from site to site often enough to look credible. Filmed in Malta has ruled it out. I’ve looked at the evidence and I agree with them. It’s not on Scene on Gozo. Gladiator II is another one I spent time on, even though I was already 99.9% certain it never came near the island. I know a lot of the extras and the local press covered the Malta shoots extensively, none of which pointed to Gozo. But you still check, because the point of the site is to be accurate, not to have the longest list.

That rigour matters more than it might seem. Other sites have listed the drive-to-the-shops scene in By the Sea as Victoria. It’s Għarb, the cobbled streets are a dead giveaway, especially to someone who watches Madame Blanc as intensely as I do. for. Small things, but they matter to the people who come here specifically because of what they watched on screen.

The other thing that helps enormously is simply living here. Film crews are part of the landscape on Gozo. Occasionally someone posts asking what’s filming, but mostly they get on with it and the island gets on with its day. Being here means you notice things, hear things, and can actually go and look.

The Gozo in a Day Film & TV Location Guide is where all the years of that research has ended up. More than 80 locations, over 40 productions, three walking routes, and the kind of detail that only comes from someone who lives here rather than visits. It’s the first in a series — Mġarr Harbour, Victoria, Dwejra Bay, and a dedicated Madame Blanc trail are all coming in 2026, with more beyond that. The ambition is a complete guide to Gozo’s filmed history, thorough enough to be genuinely useful and honest enough to tell you when something turned out not to be true.

If that sounds like your kind of guide, you can find it here.

And as ever, if you think I’ve missed something, or it’s been added erroneously, drop me an email and I’ll check it out!