# ‘It was the moment I lost innocence’: how a childhood stop-and-search led to the British debut movie of the year

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/it-was-the-moment-i-lost-innocence-how-a-childhood-stop-and-search-led-to-the-british-debut-movie-of-the-year/
- Published: 2026-07-24T07:00:07+00:00
- Updated: 2026-07-24T07:33:48+00:00
- Original publisher: The Guardian (publisher lean: Left)
- Original article: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jul/24/imran-perretta-interview-ish-british-debut-movie-of-the-year
- Topics: Culture, UK, World

## Key points

- Ish turns Perretta’s childhood trauma into a poetic coming-of-age film.
- A police stop-and-search shaped his understanding of Islamophobia.
- The artist reached film-making through architecture and gallery work.

## Summary

Imran Perretta’s debut feature, Ish, is a coming-of-age film centred on a 12-year-old British Muslim boy in Luton, drawing partly on Perretta’s own childhood experiences. The director says being stopped and searched by police at 13, after the 9/11 attacks, was the point at which he understood how he was perceived beyond the safety of family, school and community; this trauma, alongside the death of his mother, informed the film’s perspective and emotional force.

Perretta, who grew up in Streatham with a British Italian father and Bangladeshi mother, first studied architecture before moving into art and video installation. BBC Film invited him to develop a film after seeing his 2019 work The Destructors, which examines young Muslim men and is now displayed at Tate Britain; reviewers have compared Ish favourably with Kes and Satyajit Ray’s Apu films rather than more conventional urban youth dramas.

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Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.