Filmwire Spotlight: Mos Hannan

Based in London, director Mos Hannan has spent the past few years working with colleague Usayd Younis on the powerful documentary After Eight: The Satpal Ram Story. After Eight details the upsetting case of Satpal Ram, a South Asian man assaulted in the mid-80s at an Indian restaurant in Handsworth and then unjustly imprisoned for over a decade. Before the film’s Birmingham premiere as part of this year’s Flatpack Festival back in May, we talked to Mos Hannan about Satpal’s story and why it was so personal to him.

Is this Flatpack screening your first screening in Birmingham?

Yeah, it is. That’s a big deal for me and [co-director] Usayd Younis. It’s a Brummie story, Satpal’s from Handsworth. The campaign started in Birmingham, so it’s nice to finally bring it here. The film took so long to make, so it’s great for the people who were involved in the early days grassroots to finally get their eyes on it.

So how long did it actually take to make After Eight?

Four and a half years. There are many reasons why and one of them is Satpal himself. He’s suffered a lot of trauma and PTSD that’s come with his two decade long incarceration. He suffered a lot of injustice inside. He’s one of the most moved around prisoners in British penal history. He was in segregation for eight years and he suffered a lot of abuse. Us as filmmakers, that comes with a lot of due diligence, working with a vulnerable contributor. We worked with a group called Film In Mind who specialise in trauma therapy, but I never found a suitable way around it, because everyone responds to trauma differently. We had to have a lot of patience – one day he says he’ll do it, the next he says he won’t. And Satpal was still on life licence during the whole process of filming - so not in prison, but still ‘on licence’ in the community, which comes with a lot of paranoia. There was a lot Satpal didn’t like about filming and wasn’t comfortable about revealing. We were lucky to get as much as we did.

Is he no longer on life licence?

They relaxed all his licence conditions in late 2025. That was a big step forward for him, because until then, he was still tethered to the system. In a way he still is and the paranoia will always still be there, but now he doesn’t have to report where he’s going all the time.

What about Satpal’s story drew you to make a documentary about him?

Satpal was attacked in an Indian restaurant in Birmingham. Chicken tikka massala is considered a national cuisine of the UK, but there’s another side to that story, which is the racial violence that these venues suffered from in the 60s up to the 90s. My dad was hospitalised in a racist attack in the 80s. I had my experiences as well. There are many Satpals out there. That post-pub curry culture, it’s not been documented very well, so there was a real desire to tell Satpal’s story. The truth is he won’t be around forever. For me growing up, I didn’t know about the different anti-racist movements in the UK, I only knew about civil rights in the US. I think it would have done a lot of good for me if I had known about people like Satpal. I really needed to tell this story.

Has it been a tough process?

Working with Satpal is difficult. It takes a lot of patience and a lot of time passes where you can’t do anything. I found myself like a counsellor a lot of the time, because the campaigners were traumatised too. The film is just as much about them as about him. I’m approaching it 25 to 30 years on, so getting people to go into their attics to find photos and tapes was tricky. A lot of people had moved on and Satpal was the same. He doesn’t see the importance of his story, but I see how valuable it is.

Is that difference of how you both see his story a generational thing?

Someone like Satpal never wanted to be in the limelight, he was thrust into it. And being in the spotlight was his only way of getting justice. He doesn’t have to do it anymore, so I think that’s part of the reason. He just wants to live a quiet life and media presence comes with a lot of anxiety. But while I was editing the film, the 2024 race riots were kicking off and Indian takeaways and curry houses were being set ablaze. Satpal was attacked after the Handsworth riots, and it really just felt like a cycle. You ask the question, ‘How far have we really come?

Do you feel a heavy responsibility when you’re telling somebody else’s story?

Absolutely. There are so many different dimensions to Satpal’s case. He suffered literally every kind of injustice you can get in the penal system. At the initial trial he wasn’t able to speak and the waiters in the restaurant during the attack couldn’t speak either because of a language barrier. The judge ‘interpreted’ for them, even though he didn’t speak Bengali. It’s absurd! He had the Home Secretary overturn his release. He was moved from prison to prison. They call that the ‘ghost train’, where you’re moved every 28 days. The average life sentence prisoner gets moved 6 times, and Satpal was moved over 18 times. It’s completely inhumane and it takes about a month to settle into a prison, so moving him so often was designed to create fear and anxiety. He took beatings from guards, there are photos of him barely conscious and bleeding, his face swollen. So this all comes with a pressure to get it right, to demonstrate the injustice he suffered. That’s tough to show in just thirty minutes. I’m always nervous before a screening in case somebody says I didn’t get it right. One of his nephew’s friends literally said to me, ‘You’d better get this right.’

Are documentaries your focus as a filmmaker?

Yeah, I think that’s where I’ll stay for now. I am interested in narrative and fiction, but I love journalistic documentaries. I think I came to be interested in them as I grew more political. I saw it as a democratizing tool, as a way of representing my people. I grew up post 9/11, so the way Muslims were bastardized in the media, that really affected us. I grew up in Portsmouth, a very right wing white area where there was a lot of racial abuse and Islamophobia. A documentary has a way of challenging those narratives and representing us in a more dignified manner.

This interview featured in the May edition of Filmwire. Sign up for the Filmwire newsletter to stay in the loop on all the latest Midlands film happenings.