There’s a scene in Ish – the new black-and-white gem of a movie from first-time director Imran Perretta – that will feel chillingly familiar to some.
Friends Ish (Farhan Hasnat) and Maram (Yahya Kitana), both 12, are stopped on the streets as an unmarked white van screeches to a halt. Ish flees, but law enforcers pick up Maram in what can only be described as racial profiling.
Ish is Bangladeshi (Perretta himself is half-Italian, half-Bangladeshi), while Maram is Palestinian.
“It happened to me when I was 13,” Perretta, 37, who grew up in Streatham in South London, tells The National. “When Maram gets pulled into the van and Ish runs away, that happened to me when I was the same age, except I was the kid who got picked up and it was my friends who got away.
“That was a turning point in my life, because I understood how I was seen by the outside world, and it didn’t sit well with me.”
Releasing in cinemas across the UK at the end of July before expanding globally, Ish is a startling film about the British Muslim experience.
Ish and Maram live in the town of Luton, just north of London, which is one of the most ethnically diverse in the UK. It’s also disturbingly known as the birthplace of the Far Right group the English Defence League.
“I think it’s important to tell the story from the point of view of the boys, because experiencing state violence at a young age is incredibly complex,” says Perretta. “It becomes existential, where it causes you to question who you are, because you become violently aware of how the state sees you. It forces you to see yourself in a different way.”
While the police remain unseen throughout in the film, Perretta occasionally cuts to shots of tracker technology – invasive facial recognition software that identifies potential targets. “It’s another weapon with which the state can identify people and intervene in their lives,” he says. “For me, the idea that you would use that against young, vulnerable people feels incredibly wrong.”
Co-written by Perretta and Enda Walsh, the celebrated Irish playwright and screenwriter, the film goes wider, showing the boys looking at footage of the destruction of Gaza on their phones.
“Yahya, who plays Maram, his family is from the West Bank,” says Perretta, who changed the screenplay “to embrace who he is in real life and his relationship to this geopolitical disaster, this genocide”.
It’s traumatic, he says, for the boys to see people who resemble themselves in such “unspeakable” circumstances, all fed to them on their phones. “That’s something very different to when I was that age, and 9/11 happened. It was on the TV, but you had to turn the TV on. With kids now, they get on TikTok and they might want to see content from friends mucking about, but actually what they get is an endless feed of trauma.”
In what is essentially a film about growing up – Ish, Maram and their mates all wander Luton and the surrounding countryside across one long summer – this paints a picture far from childhood innocence. “The idea is that they have a hostile environment at home and they have a hostile environment abroad, and they’re contending with both in real time,” says Perretta. “That, in the context of a coming-of-age film, felt so interesting.”
While Perretta is a multimedia artist, he’s always admired cinema. The chance to work with Walsh, who scripted Steve McQueen’s Hunger, was nothing short of a dream come true.
“Even though his life has been very different to mine, ultimately there are things that are universal: heartache, friendship, what it means to actually come from a suspect community. Lest we forget, the original suspect community in the UK were the Irish, so there are all these parallel narratives that we share.”
For all the heartache the film shows, Perretta loves Luton and the Bangladeshi community he’s come to know over the years.
“It’s an amazing place with amazing people,” he says. “Ultimately, what we’re doing is telling their stories, about their trauma, but also their resilience, of the joy of the community, of the solidarity between them. We’re saying if the state doesn’t love us, we don’t care. We’ll look after ourselves.”
