Feature first-timer Simon Ryninks writes and directs this likably daft but big-hearted YA comedy drama, inspired by West Wales’s reputation as a hotspot for UFO sightings – particularly Broad Haven in Pembrokeshire, where many saucer-eyed people in 1977 really did report close encounters of the first kind. Now the scene is the fictionalised Welsh town of Caradoc in 1999, a world of smoking in pubs, dot-matrix computer printouts, Sony Handicam video cameras and droll references to the New Labour government.
Maz (Nerys Amber Stocks) is a teenager doing A-levels, haunted by the death of her dad five years before: a scientist working at a top secret Ministry of Defence base who was killed in a mysterious incident involving a flash of white light from above. She witnessed this terrible event as a kid, having cheekily smuggled herself into the base in the back of his car, but now can’t quite remember it in detail. PTSD? Or have aliens wiped her memory?
