Ish
Visual artist Imran Perretta makes his feature filmmaking debut with the tender tale of two Luton adolescents whose friendship is rocked by the trauma of a racially-motivated police stop-and-search
Imran Perretta's 2019 installation The Destructors staged young Muslim men as objects of a state gaze, unable to distinguish between protection and persecution. Ish, the London-based artist's first narrative feature, translates that inquiry into something more intimate and, in the current climate of rising Islamophobia, considerably more urgent.
The film follows friends Ish (Farhan Hasnat) and Maram (Yahya Kitana), two teenagers of British-South Asian and British-Palestinian descent living in Luton. Suspended between adolescence and adulthood, their friendship is an anchor in an otherwise unstable world. Ish recently lost his mother and lives with his father (Avin Shah), grandmother (Sudha Bhuchar), and protective older sister (singer-songwriter Joy Crookes). Maram, meanwhile, is confronted by footage of the genocide in Gaza flooding his social media feed. The pair are inseparable until a racially profiled stop-and-search fractures their bond.
Perretta's formal choices are precise and mutually reinforcing. The film's black-and-white palette echoes the CCTV footage spliced throughout, collapsing the distance between aesthetic and subject until being watched and being filmed become structurally indistinguishable. Perretta has always understood rhythm as a register available to those denied other forms of expression, and a percussive clap motif resurfaces throughout his score, giving form to feelings that resist verbal articulation.
The film ends with the boys at a crossroads: Ish is surrounded by family; Maram's destination is less certain. It's a subtle, yet quietly devastating final sequence that depicts what Perretta has always understood: that a single moment of state suspicion can be decisive enough to determine which way a life turns.
Released 31 Jul by BFI; certificate 15