THE MALTA FESTIVAL was born at a very specific moment of transition in Poland and for Poles. At the beginning of the 1990s we were still hungrily swallowing our newly acquired freedom. We were impassioned by the television coverage of parliament (where members expressed exactly what they thought in grammatically correct Polish), we read papers from front to back (a world, formerly known to us only through autopsy, but now related without resort to the official mumbo-jumbo of our former epoch). We strongly believed that life could be beautiful, truly ours.