Moin Hussain Q&A: ‘Sky Peals is a story about alienation and this feeling that I was partly from somewhere else’
‘This film is a story about alienation and this feeling that I’ve always had of knowing that I was partly from somewhere else,’ says writer-director Moin Hussain. Photo by Shane Anthony Sinclair/Getty Images for BFI
The director on his debut feature and why science fiction was the right genre for a film about mixed-race identity
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Moin Hussain, 32, had always wanted to make a film set at a service station. As a teenager, the writer-director worked at a McDonalds not far from his home in east London. During his time there, Hussain came to appreciate the transitory, chance encounters he had with new faces amid the mundane retail space he worked in.
This observation formed the basis of future creative projects, including his debut feature film, Sky Peals, which is set in an eerie petrol station. It follows Adam, a night-shift worker who, upon learning of his estranged father’s death, is plagued with strange visions and blackouts, and becomes increasingly convinced he is descended from someone from outer space. Adam’s struggle to understand his mixed background — his mother is white and father Pakistani, like Hussain himself — is given an E.T. treatment in this science fiction drama.
The film premiered in Critics’ Week at the 2023 Venice film festival, an event dedicated to first-time filmmakers, and was favourably reviewed by critics.
Hussain studied cinema and photography at Leeds University and has since made short films, including Real Gods Require Blood and Naphtha, both of which were screened in Critics’ Week at the Cannes film festival. In 2018, he was named one of Screen International magazine’s Stars of Tomorrow.
Hussain spoke to Hyphen about his film’s take on identity and isolation, and his upcoming projects.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where did the idea for Sky Peals come from? Were you inspired by personal experience, or was there something about the sci-fi genre that spoke to you?
It was a bit of both. There was a lot about Adam, the main character’s life — like his mixed heritage identity — that is close to mine. There’s a lot that’s fictional as well. I’ve wanted to make a film set in a service station for a really long time. I was obsessed with it as this strange spaceship-like space. But it was only through making Naptha in the sci-fi genre, which explored ideas of identity, immigration and alienation, that I came back to this idea of a service station.
How have you used sci-fi to explore mixed identity?
This film is a story about alienation and this feeling that I’ve always had of knowing that I was partly from somewhere else, which felt very alien to me, but also very alien to the experience of other people around me.
It’s about somebody who has a lot of absences in his life and is trying to fill or understand those absences. It’s a story about what happens when you’re having to colour in those absences for yourself and the strange places you end up, the answers you end up finding, or don’t end up finding.
Some people watch Sky Peals and say, “This is a British-Asian character who’s struggling in a white Britain”. It is that, but there’s also a scene with him in the mosque, and he’s wearing a suit because he doesn’t know what to wear there. It’s about him not really having the language to access either space.
You haven’t named the town where Sky Peals is set. Why is that?
It was important to me that it could be anywhere in the UK. I was interested in these “nowhere places”. Not just in the service station, but in the rest of the locations in the film, these quiet, little suburban pockets, church halls and mosques, places that you don’t really explore that much in cinema. I was doing something that felt like it had scale, that felt big and cosmic but in very small, quiet places.
How do you think Sky Peals relates to popular thinking on identity and heritage today?
I’m interested in exploring the limits of our understanding of identity. In the last few years, there’s been a real desire to talk about identities in terms of absolutes. But I feel like that’s bullshit, we’re increasingly becoming more mixed — culturally, socially, through every kind of lens. There are challenges with that but I think it’s a positive thing.
Obviously, you can find a lot of comfort, understanding and belonging in certain identities, but we can go too far and believe this particular identity is the answer to everything, which can take you to strange places.
What’s next for you?
I’ve got a couple of things I’m writing at the moment. One of them is set in a textile mill in Yorkshire in the 1970s. The other is a project set in Burma during the second world war, about an older British soldier, a captain, and a younger Indian soldier. It’s basically about their relationship and I’m interested in exploring the end of the empire through this story.
Sky Peals is in UK cinemas from 9 August 2024
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