Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
American thriller film Relay is out now in theatres.
Starring Riz Ahmed and Lily James, Relay tackles a world class fixer who specialises in helping whistle-blowers get paid off by corrupt companies while keeping his identity secret through a relay service for the deaf.
A whistle-blower is a person who tells on a person or organisation that is engaging in unlawful or immoral activities.
Things take a turn when Ash (Riz) receives a message from Sarah Grant (Lily), a biotech company worker who stumbled upon something scandalous. To make it public, she steals confidential documents, however, her employer finds out the plot and is now intimidating her.
In an interview, director David Mackenzie explained how the main character keeps his identity hidden throughout the film, as he goes by multiple names and disguises.
“He tries to live below the radar. And one of the things in particular that he does is, he uses this old technology for the deaf – the relay system, where you would speak to an operator.
“An operator would relay the message to the person who was hard of hearing with some kind of text using a device called a TTY (teletypewriter) machine. And then the person who was hard of hearing would relay it back using the machine, and then the operator would relay it to the person using their voice.
“It’s a way of communicating with people that is below the digital radar, which is how he is able to exist without being noticed by the corporate kind of henchmen security people who are trying to harass Sarah and intimidate her.”
