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