08/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: The London-based writer-director opens up about combining the mundane and the fantastical

In Sky Peals [+see also:
film review
interview: Moin Hussain
film profile], shown in Venice’s International Film Critics’ Week, Adam (Faraz Ayub) works night shifts at a service station. He is lonely and already getting used to it, until he hears that his absentee father – the man who was convinced that he wasn’t actually human – has died. We talked to director Moin Hussain about his new movie.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Cineuropa: You seem to embrace kindness, at least in your characters, which is the opposite to what most people are doing now. There appear to be many films about serial killers at Venice this year.
Moin Hussain: It all started with this man. In a way, he is a child. I see it as a coming-of-age story, even though it’s kind of late for him already. There is something innocent about him, I think. It does often feel like cinema is only interested in the morally ambiguous, and I guess we all are, but I wanted to make a film about connection and loneliness.

There are a couple of scenes when it feels, or rather sounds, like he’s underwater. He is drowning. Why did you want to play with the sound like that?
I am very interested in sound and music, and this is a man who doesn’t give much away. He isn’t particularly emotive, so I needed to find another way for the audience to get inside his head. I mean, it’s a story about someone who believes he’s an alien. It’s absurd, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that. It’s up to the audience to decide what’s real and what’s not, but I wanted it to be real for him, in a way.

He is dealing with grief, but he also needs to let go of it in order to grow. He almost gives up at one point.
These are the moments when we start thinking about who we really are. The decision he has to make throughout the film is whether he will choose to be with others or be on his own, which seems to be much easier, obviously. When we were casting, there was a lot of talk about him being in his early twenties. I knew he needed to be older, in his thirties, because I know people like that. It felt more truthful.

Are you interested in so-called “invisible” people, even though I don’t like this expression? People who were told there is no point in dreaming?
I find myself drawn to mundanity, I guess – in locations, environments and people who, at least to the outside world, seem to be living these “mundane” lives. I could never imagine myself making a film about a famous author or a filmmaker. I like stories about this disparity between the mundane and the fantastical; I like how they can rub against each other. With my shorts, I was playing around with that, too. Sometimes, when you are trying to put two things together just for the sake of it, it doesn’t work. But to me, this is a sci-fi film, but it’s a drama as well.

And that service station? It feels magical. I worked in one of them, and that wasn’t always magical, but it really felt like a spaceship. All this darkness outside and isolation, and bright lights everywhere. You start daydreaming, imagining being somewhere else. That’s what came to me first: it was that place. For the longest time, I had this world, it was ready, but I had no character. I kept checking my watch, waiting for him to come.

Adam starts interacting with others, eventually. It’s like a road movie composed of little encounters.
I am glad it reminded you of that. I thought of it as a road movie where nobody really goes anywhere. Others move past him, but he stays in this place, always in between things. It’s not that he doesn’t want to connect, but it’s difficult, and he is at the point of giving up. The loss of his father sends him off on a series of events, and he starts to come out of the tiny box he has been living in. You could say these encounters are inconsequential, and geographically, he remains where he was. But everything has changed.