Imran Perretta always knew that the title of his debut feature film would be \u201cIsh\u201d \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019s perspective on the world.<\/p>\n
The response has been lovely, says Perretta, and a relief. \u201cIt\u2019s nice that people have compared Ish to those films rather than Kidulthood. I did worry about that.\u201d Why, because it features kids speaking in slang and getting into scrapes? He nods. \u201cI always say that I don\u2019t read reviews, but of course I\u2019ve read every single one. I can\u2019t help myself. And we\u2019ve been really lucky; the reviews have been amazing. A couple have been middling. Then you read them, and the subtext is: \u2018I thought it was going to be like Kidulthood.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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. \u201cI\u2019m knackered,\u201d he says with a grin, chatting a mile a minute, no sign of tiredness.<\/p>\n 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: \u201cShe was super political, a firebrand.\u201d 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 \u00a310,000 bursaries. But it never crossed his mind that he could direct a film, he says: \u201cNot in a million years did I think I would ever get to do that. That\u2019s something that happens to other people.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Perretta\u2019s 2019 video installation The Destructor is currently on show at Tate Britain, London. Photograph: Andy Keate for Turner Bursaries<\/p>\n 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. \u201cMy mate got away. They pulled me into a van and just started asking me loads of weird questions,\u201d he remembers. \u201cI was so young, I didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n It politicised him, says Perretta. \u201cThat kind of made me. From that point I had something to make work about. If I look at everything I\u2019ve 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.\u201d He co-wrote Ish with the Irish playwright and scriptwriter Enda Walsh<\/a>.<\/p>\n Farhan Hasnat as Ish. Photograph: Venice film festival<\/p>\n Like all brilliant coming-of-age films, Ish is culturally specific but also universal. It\u2019s 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\u2019s their last summer of boyhood: they are still young enough to build dens in the woods and pick blackberries. Ish\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n