Ish [+leggi anche:
intervista: Imran Perretta
scheda film] is a contraction of the name of its lead character, Ismael, but it also evokes the suffix “-ish” at the end of English adjectives, referring to something partly at arm’s length, not fully committed. A young British-Asian Muslim boy on the verge of adolescence, Ish (Farhan Hasnat, cast from the local area), is stuck between stations socially and emotionally, mourning the recent death of his mother, and tentatively finding an almost fraternal relationship with his new close friend Maram (Yahya Kitana). But this is Luton, an area outside London notoriously targeted by counter-terrorism police, and even these two guileless kids and their wider group of friends find themselves encircled by its racist social profiling. The feature debut by Imran Perretta, who first won acclaim making audiovisual art, is competing in the Venice International Film Critics’ Week.

You could describe Ish as quite an archetypal coming-of-age drama, with the lessons learned from social bonding and family strife painful enough, before it’s violently gate-crashed by the undercover police, a greater antagonistic force. Or instead, Perretta and the decorated political playwright Enda Walsh, his co-screenwriter on the movie, could be showing how ordinary subsistence is impossible for young people from that racial and class background following the 9/11 attacks – with Muslim life in the UK, since that tragic event, facing undue suspicion.

The narrative begins innocuously with Ish and Maram cultivating their friendship by making a fort in the Bedfordshire forest bordering the town. The cinematography by Jermaine Canute Edwards engrosses us immediately, deploying a digital black-and-white look that’s been expertly softened and distressed in post, and its purposeful handheld movement privileges low angles that make the boys look oddly gigantic against the withered suburban buildings around them. The volatility and tenderness established comes to a head when Maram, who’s of Palestinian descent, talks about the antipathy he already harbours towards the police, comparing them to the IDF (news broadcasts on the Gaza war occasionally crowd the sound mix) and arming himself with a flick knife.

Foreshadowed by quick-fire PoV surveillance footage that ominously breaks up the dramaturgic scenes, the film’s key incident comes when an undercover police van corners the boys in an ordinary residential street. Maram is bundled into the heavily fortified vehicle for what we assume is a physical search and interrogation, but Ish dashes away before they can apprehend him, too, protecting himself whilst risking feelings of betrayal towards his unlucky friend.

The rest of the movie develops more anticlimactically from this, with Ish returning to the bosom of his family, taking wisdom from his grandmother Nanu (Sudha Bhuchar), with whom he converses, haltingly but movingly, in her native tongue. Maram falls in with some brashly confident older boys carrying themselves like an embryonic street “gang”, but whose appetite for petty crime only amounts to nicking fireworks from a corner shop, to set off in the aforementioned surrounding forest.

The overall ambience created by Perretta is a real asset to Ish; it thus lifts itself over more generic British social realism and immerses us in the characters’ woes in an experiential way. But for all that impresses, there’s ultimately something a bit compressed and unsatisfying about its overall dramatic arc, fit for a literary short story or featurette-length film (as opposed to a short), and the characterisations also feel more skeletal compared to the full-bodied way they’re inhabited by the principal cast.  

Ish is a UK-US production, staged by Primal Pictures, Good Chaos and Home Team, alongside BBC Film, the BFI, Calculus Media and Out of Order Studios. Its international sales are courtesy of Global Constellation.