‘It was the moment I lost innocence’: how a childhood stop-and-search led to the British debut movie of the year
Imran Perretta always knew that the title of his debut feature film would be “Ish” – short for Ishmail, the name of the 12-year-old boy from Luton at the heart of his story. Only later did people point out the similarity to other coming-of-age films with three letters in the title: Kes by Ken Loach, and Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy. Now, as the reviews trickle in, the comparisons to Kes and Apu keep coming. Like them, Ish is a poetic film that grabs you by the heart and pulls you into a child’s perspective on the world.
The response has been lovely, says Perretta, and a relief. “It’s nice that people have compared Ish to those films rather than Kidulthood. I did worry about that.” Why, because it features kids speaking in slang and getting into scrapes? He nods. “I always say that I don’t read reviews, but of course I’ve read every single one. I can’t help myself. And we’ve been really lucky; the reviews have been amazing. A couple have been middling. Then you read them, and the subtext is: ‘I thought it was going to be like Kidulthood.’”
Perretta is just back from a trip to Poland for the opening of a new exhibition of his work. Yesterday he was at Tate Britain in London, tweaking the sound on his 2019 video installation The Destructors, about the lives of young Muslim men, which has just gone on show at the gallery. He is in the process of buying his first home and has two small children. “I’m knackered,” he says with a grin, chatting a mile a minute, no sign of tiredness.
He grew up in Streatham, south London, the son of a British Italian dad who worked as a music journalist. His mother, who was born in Bangladesh, was a child protection social worker: “She was super political, a firebrand.” She died from cancer when he was 21. Perretta studied architecture for three years, before switching to art. During Covid in 2020, when the Turner prize was cancelled, he was one of 10 artists to receive £10,000 bursaries. But it never crossed his mind that he could direct a film, he says: “Not in a million years did I think I would ever get to do that. That’s something that happens to other people.” It was the head of BBC Film at the time, Rose Garnett, who approached him to write a film treatment after seeing The Destructors at a gallery in London.
Ish is partly autobiographical, based on the first time Perretta was stopped and searched by police aged 13. This was in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in a climate of increasing Islamophobia. “My mate got away. They pulled me into a van and just started asking me loads of weird questions,” he remembers. “I was so young, I didn’t really understand what was going on. It was incredibly traumatic. That was 100% the moment in my childhood when I lost my innocence. Because I understood how I was seen outside my family home, outside school, outside the community, all these protected spaces. In that moment, I understood I was seen as a deviant or some sort of threat.”
It politicised him, says Perretta. “That kind of made me. From that point I had something to make work about. If I look at everything I’ve done for years, making work that is viewed by the public on the walls of a gallery or whatever, it all comes from that moment of seeing oneself as other people see you.” He co-wrote Ish with the Irish playwright and scriptwriter Enda Walsh.
Like all brilliant coming-of-age films, Ish is culturally specific but also universal. It’s set in Luton, following 12-year-olds Ish (Farhan Hasnat) and his best mate Maram (Yahya Kitana) as they roam about during the holidays. It’s their last summer of boyhood: they are still young enough to build dens in the woods and pick blackberries. Ish’s mum has just died, and at home his family are dazed by grief. Maram, who is already a foot taller than Ish and has the beginnings of a moustache, is hanging around with older boys, getting in trouble.
The stop and search, when it happens, is shocking – watching a child being grabbed from the street, forcefully and without parental consent. When I say this to Perretta, he points out the recent case of Child Q and accounts of interviews conducted with children under the government’s anti-extremism Prevent strategy without a parent or teacher in the room. “It happens to children from certain backgrounds more than others. I wanted to explore what it means to drag children into the adult world before their time.”
All the kids in Ish are played by first-time actors. The casting process took six months, auditioning about 900 local boys. Unbeknown to the film-makers, the pair who got the roles of Ish and Maram had been friends since they were toddlers. Their bond shines through on screen; the chemistry is unfakeable. “It was just about getting out of their way, letting them do what they do naturally, which is basically wind each other up,” Peretta says.
Ish was shot in Luton over five weeks in the summer of 2024. Perretta’s wife, a secondary school teacher, grew up down the road, and he has been visiting the area for years. Perretta says that commuter towns take a lot of stick. Luton in particular has frequently been in the news for negative reasons, as the home town of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) or labelled as a centre of Islamic extremism. “But at the heart of it was just a community going about their business,” he says.
He shot the film in luminous monochrome. Why, I ask? “What I figured is black and white didn’t negatively aesthetise Luton. It gave it grandeur. It made the concrete feel like marble. When you shot in colour, you immediately felt the fact that it had been at the sharp end of austerity.”
Filming days were short to comply with laws to protect child actors. “When you film with kids, there’s an egg timer. They can only be on set for six hours.” The key, he says, was not to be too precious about nailing it. “We just didn’t have the time.” That sounds stressful, I suggest. Perretta shrugs good-naturedly. “I would like to say that I’m fairly unflappable in those situations. It sounds sort of trite, but when you’ve looked after someone that’s dying, a film set is not that bad. I refuse to get to wound up about that sort of thing.” He smiles. “It’s an extraordinary thing to make a film. On a personal level it’s extremely important. But on the scale of all the things that can happen in life, it’s not really.”
Perretta says his mother getting ill is what set him on the path to becoming an artist. “After she died, I thought: I have to dedicate my life to doing the things that I want to do.” He was 18 when she was diagnosed with cancer, and he was one of her carers, along with his dad and his younger sister. “That was my first degree. And after my mum died, I was working in an architect’s practice and thought: Life’s too short to design toilets.” Is that what he was doing, designing toilets? “Literally. I was working on the team that was spacing toilet cubicles. I won’t tell you where – it’s a high-profile architect.” He lasted a week. “I was like: Nah, I’m good.”
When his mother was sick, he had visited the Serpentine gallery in London to watch Blue, Derek Jarman’s final film, first released in 1993 months before his death from an Aids-related illness. “It was so extraordinary seeing that film. I stayed there for hours. I’d never had any experience of contemporary art before, other than school trips to the Tate. I was spellbound by it. I thought: ‘Oh God, I need to do that.’ I just need to run at the things that make me angry and scared, and make work about them. That was the beginning.” He grins. “And here we are.”