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‘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.
In short
- 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.
Explained simply
Imran Perretta is a British-Bangladeshi filmmaker whose debut feature, Ish, is a coming-of-age film about a 12-year-old Muslim boy in Luton. The story draws partly on Perretta's own childhood in Streatham, where he grew up with an Italian father and a Bangladeshi mother.
Perretta initially trained in architecture before moving into video art and installation. His 2019 work examining young Muslim men was seen by BBC Film, who subsequently invited him to develop his first feature film.
Critics have compared the film favourably to celebrated films such as Kes and Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy. Perretta has described how a childhood police stop-and-search and his mother's death shaped his perspective and informed the film's emotional force.