George Amponsah once had his mobile phone stolen by a thief on a moped. The British director was on his bike at a stop sign in London, looking up directions, when the device was swiped from his hand. “I just saw this youngster accelerating away,” he recalls with an exasperated smile. “I tried to give chase but I didn’t get very far. He swerved into an estate and I never saw that phone again.”
So when Amponsah was later approached by a producer to make a film about a moped gang, he wasn’t too enthused. At the time, newspapers were filled with stories about a huge wave of moped robberies. Headlines, politicians and police took turns to castigate the faceless thugs terrorising the streets. “I thought, ‘I’m not sure I want to do something about these criminals who are causing a lot of upset.’ But I realised it was an opportunity to take a story about ‘feral young scumbags’ and try to find the humanity in one such character.”
