Film on U.K.'s complicated relationship with race and identity is as timely as ever (2024)

A new film released this past week in the U.K. addressed the country's complicated relationship with racial and religious identities. It hit the screens amid far-right protests.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

A new film released this past week in the U.K. addresses the country's complicated relationship with racial and religious identities. It hits the screens just as far-right protests against Muslim communities and immigration policies had rocked and shocked dozens of British towns and cities. From London, Willem Marx reports.

WILLEM MARX, BYLINE: After the shocking murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance club last month, the town of Southport came together to commemorate their lives. But just hours after that impromptu vigil, as online social media posts incorrectly identified the suspect as a Muslim immigrant, dozens of masked men surrounded a nearby mosque.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Get back.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Get back. Get back.

MARX: The violence that ensued overwhelmed peace and horrified much of the local community. But it also spawned many more copycat riots nationwide, forcing Britain's latest public reckoning with race, racism and intolerance that is still sometimes directed at minority groups in an increasingly multicultural country. It's the kind of occasionally uncomfortable reckoning that is at the heart of a new British movie, "Sky Peals," that premiered this past Friday. It centers on a young British Asian man called Adam Muhammed, played by actor Faraz Ayub. He works at a service station on a busy British highway and comes to believe his South Asian father was, in fact, an extraterrestrial, as he explains in one memorable scene to members of a shocked therapy group.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SKY PEALS")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) If you've got anything to share, please feel free. It is what we do here.

FARAZ AYUB: (As Adam Muhammed) My dad - I think my dad might have been an alien.

MARX: Ayub, as Adam, asks searching questions about personal identity as he quietly and rather eerily examines his place in the world.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SKY PEALS")

AYUB: (As Adam Muhammed) Do you ever wonder if you're in the right place, like this is where you were supposed to end up?

MARX: The British Film Institute released the movie in the U.K., the first feature from writer and director Moin Hussain, who has a mixed English and Pakistani heritage that he says played a part in his decision to develop this project.

MOIN HUSSAIN: It's a sense of not quite being sure as to where to place yourself, you know, having a foot in both camps but not entirely being a part of another. With this film, I kind of - I guess I just started up to 11, really took it to its biggest extreme in terms of these ideas of, you know, alienation and communication and contact.

MARX: He says the film is also about isolation and loneliness that often drives people's confusion around identity and sometimes motivates misguided violence of the kind seen recently across Britain.

HUSSAIN: It's this fact that we don't feel we can place ourselves in the world or understand a world - or in this country at least - I'm sure it's applicable for a lot of places. But definitely it feels like it's kind of - it puts the film in a new light.

MARX: Hussain raises questions in the movie about identity that he says were almost selfishly as much for himself to answer as anyone else. But they seem to have impacted audiences, too, with viewers online hailing the film as haunting but also unsettling, as conversations in contemporary British culture about these complex topics often are as well. For NPR News, I'm Willem Marx.

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