For many years, says Moin Hussain, he had a dream of making a film set in a motorway service station. It would be science fiction, “because I’ve always felt that they were like spaceships; these strange lit-up spaces that are all isolated and synthetic, surrounded by darkness. I was just fascinated by that image.” But it was only with the arrival of Adam – a lonely mixed-race night worker in a fast-food outlet – that he found a character and a story capable of bringing the image to life, in what would become his debut feature film, Sky Peals.
At first, Adam seems like a textbook example of how not to create a movie protagonist. The plot kicks off with a phone message from his estranged Pakistani father, which he leaves unanswered despite its apparent urgency. He is equally impassive as his childhood home is packed up and moved into storage, so that his white mother can move across the country to live with her new husband.
