Imran Perretta on Ish, his debut film born from stop-and-search
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- Imran Perretta's debut feature "Ish" follows 12-year-old Ishmail in Luton; reviews have compared the film to Ken Loach's "Kes" and Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy, a comparison Perretta said he had hoped for rather than being compared to "Kidulthood"
- Perretta has said the film is partly autobiographical, based on his being stopped and searched aged 13 in the aftermath of 9/11 — an experience he called "100% the moment in my childhood when I lost my innocence" and which politicised his art
- Rose Garnett, then head of BBC Film, approached Perretta to write a film treatment after seeing his 2019 video installation "The Destructors" at a London gallery; Perretta said directing a film was something he never imagined doing
- Ish was shot in luminous monochrome in Luton over five weeks in summer 2024, with Perretta saying black and white "gave it grandeur" and prevented the town from being "negatively aesthetised"
- Casting took six months and auditioned about 900 local boys; the two leads — Farhan Hasnat as Ish and Yahya Kitana as Maram — are first-time actors who had been friends since toddlerhood, a bond the filmmakers only discovered after casting
- Perretta was one of 10 artists to receive £10,000 Turner prize bursaries during Covid in 2020 when the prize was cancelled, and his work "The Destructors" is currently on show at Tate Britain
- Perretta, who grew up in Streatham as the son of a British Italian music journalist and a Bangladeshi child protection social worker, said his mother's death from cancer when he was 21 set him on his artistic path
Why it matters: Perretta's leap from spacing toilet cubicles at a "high-profile architect" to directing a film that landed comparisons to "Kes" and the Apu trilogy marks one of the most striking British debuts of the year. The film puts a personal stop-and-search story into dialogue with the Child Q case and the Prevent strategy, foregrounding how Muslim children are pulled into the adult world — an angle that reviews of "Kidulthood"-coded British youth dramas typically skip.
