‘I lost my innocence’: childhood stop-and-search inspired Imran Perretta’s debut film ‘Ish’

Imran Perretta always knew his debut feature would be titled “Ish” – short for Ishmail, a 12-year-old boy in Luton at the story’s centre. Critics have since likened it to other three-letter coming-of-age films: Ken Loach’s “Kes” and Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy. Perretta says the positive comparisons are a relief, as he had feared it might be seen as another “Kidulthood”.

Perretta grew up in Streatham, south London, the son of a British Italian music journalist father and a Bangladeshi-born child protection social worker mother, who died of cancer when he was 21. He studied architecture before switching to art. During the 2020 pandemic, when the Turner Prize was cancelled, he was one of ten artists given £10,000 bursaries. He never imagined he could direct a film, until BBC Film’s then-head Rose Garnett approached him after seeing his 2019 video installation “The Destructors”.

“Ish” is partly autobiographical, based on Perretta’s first stop-and-search at age 13, after 9/11 in a climate of rising Islamophobia. He was pulled into a van and questioned, a traumatic moment that made him understand how others saw him as a deviant or threat. “It was the moment I lost innocence,” he says. That experience politicised him and became the foundation of his work.

The film is set in Luton during the summer holidays, following 12-year-old Ish (Farhan Hasnat) and his best friend Maram (Yahya Kitana). Ish’s mother has just died, while Maram is drifting towards older boys. The stop-and-search scene is shocking – a child seized from the street without parental consent. Perretta notes parallels with the Child Q case and the government’s Prevent strategy.

All child actors were first-timers, cast from about 900 local boys over six months. Unbeknown to the filmmakers, the leads had been friends since toddlers, giving their chemistry an unfakeable quality. The film was shot in black-and-white over five weeks in summer 2024 in Luton, to give the town grandeur and avoid negative stereotyping. Filming days were short due to laws protecting child actors (six hours on set).

Perretta credits his mother’s illness and death for setting him on an artistic path. He briefly worked in an architect’s office designing toilet cubicles before quitting, thinking “life’s too short to design toilets”. Visiting Derek Jarman’s film “Blue” at the Serpentine gallery while his mother was sick inspired him to make art about things that make him angry and scared.