For anyone who grew up as a Millennial in the UK, it’s easy to remember the 2000s right-wing media’s obsession with multiculturalism and social cohesion. Imran Perretta, a very “London” filmmaker with roots in its arts and music scenes, has created a response to this with Ish [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Imran Perretta
ficha de la película], his first feature, premiering in Venice’s International Film Critics’ Week. Following two boys on the cusp of adolescence in Luton (located outside of the capital), whose summer idyll is disrupted by the government’s ongoing stop-and-search policy that disproportionately targets young Muslims, it represents a bold new variation on typical British social realism. The director told us more, delving into the story’s shocking personal resonance and talking up his striking aesthetic choices.

Cineuropa: Could you tell us about the film’s origins? Why was it natural to choose a story for your debut film that evoked your youth?
Imran Perretta: You know, it’s always said that your first feature’s been in your head your entire life. And that's probably the case with Ish. It came into sharper focus around the time I made my last film, The Destructors, conceived for an exhibition space in two channels. One of the testimonies or narratives in that film just connected with me and reminded me of a certain time in my youth, around the age of 12 or 13, which is the age of Ish’s two main protagonists. It's a very febrile time in one's teenage years for so many reasons, but especially for me in a very early post-9/11 world, where there was a lot of scrutiny of young people like myself. And really, coming-of-age films are about the loss of innocence. I know exactly when I lost my innocence: it was when I was first dragged into the back of a police car. It felt very natural to plumb the depths of that time in my life.

You’ve spoken about the movie’s relevance to the current conversation on masculinity and male mental health. What motivated you to explore this issue?
Having enough distance from it now, I've always been interested in how young men are with each other, or at least young men from a similar background to mine. There’s this particular sociality which, in equal measure, has care, love and kindness to it, but can also be slightly brutal. But whilst they might seem binary, they're actually incredibly nuanced ways of relating to each other, like a type of love language. Given that these boys are growing up in a hostile environment, what could be mistaken for violence can actually be an expression of love and care.

Anti-Muslim discrimination and racial profiling are also two of the film’s core concerns. Why was it important to show this through the eyes of boys of that age?
It’s a really simple answer – it’s because it’s what happened to me. Through being subject to some form of state violence, I became very aware of how the state, and therefore the world, saw me. That was a true existential reckoning for me as a young person. I wanted to show people that when something happens like that, it could fundamentally change not just their relationships – this close friendship between these two boys – but also one’s sense of self.

The choice to shoot in black and white, and the mobility of the camerawork, set it apart from other contemporary British realist films. How did you create this sense of tactility and “aliveness” in the visuals?
I think the choice to shoot preliminary stills on film influenced the image that we ended up with. I find that a place often tells you how it wants to be depicted. Looking back at the images, comparing our colour to black-and-white shots, Luton just loved black and white. It's something to do with the scale and monumentality that black and white offers. Luton is, in many ways, a slightly unloved place. It's just like many parts of London – there's a good amount of urban decay there. Colour seemed to negatively accentuate those qualities, in a way that I felt demeaned a place I find very beautiful, aesthetically and culturally.

For film projects you might make in the future, I get the sense you’d still like to continue exploring British Muslim life, and its connection to broader geopolitics.
My practice as a filmmaker is a political practice. My lifelong project is to create a sort of canon around lives that resemble mine culturally and politically.