Ish

In a world where adolescence is so often reduced to doomscrolling, six-sevens and brainrot, debut director Imran Perretta’s tender coming-of-age drama puts forward a strong case that children today are still capable of feeling deeply.

Rather than retread London’s streets, co-writers Perretta and playwright Enda Walsh (I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning) take us a smidge north to Luton. The town’s unkempt woodlands make the perfect playground for 12-year-old friends, Ish (Farhan Hasnat) and Maram (Yahya Kitana). There we find the Muslim boys roughhousing, stuffing their faces with unidentified berries and building forts with stray mattresses. Like the planes that fly overhead from the local airport, there’s a sense of weightlessness to their imagination. But like the contrails trailing behind them, it’s fleeting.

Their tiny frames already bear adult struggles. For Ish, it’s the loss of his mother; for Maram, who is of Palestinian descent, it’s the conflict in Gaza, leaving him convinced the ‘war is coming’.

Back in Luton’s urban centre, the sound of sirens should be unnerving, but neither of them even flinches. Police sirens have already become part of the soundtrack of their childhood, a familiar reality for many Brown and Black communities in the UK.

An artist and composer too, Perretta’s musical ear is evident in the film’s devastating sound design. The clipped chatter of police radios referring to Muslim passersby as ‘suspects’ and ‘targets’, and discussions about Islamophobia on the television act as needles popping bubbles of bliss.

Twelve-year-old friendships are supposed to collapse over bruised egos, talking to the same girl or cheating at FIFA. Here the wedge is driven in by a police van. The officers act on dodgy facial recognition tech which wrongly ties the boys to crime, but the youngsters have no faith they’ll be heard. Fight or flight instincts take hold, with the combative Maram standing his ground and Ish fleeing in a panic. Maram is flung out of the van, but the damage to their relationship is already done.

Ish puts forward a strong case that children today are still capable of feeling deeply

While Top Boy has become a reference point for street tales, Perretta’s feature debut leans more towards François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Cinematographer Jermaine Canute Edwards’ (My Father’s Shadow) black-and-white photography adds an air of timelessness; even the Luton Council rubbish bins feel arthouse. 

As performers, Hasnat and Kitana’s endearing rawness makes the slang feel lived-in rather than something conceived in a writer's workshop. That authenticity runs through the film's quieter details too, from grandma’s prayers and home-cooked Bengali meals, to children naturally calling their elders ‘auntie’ and ‘uncle’.

Childhood should be a refuge from the world's ugliness, but Ish understands how little protection it offers when racial profiling, grief and distant conflicts all arrive on your doorstep at once. Perretta refuses to romanticise growing up, yet never loses sight of the tenderness that makes it worth protecting.

In UK and Ireland cinemas Jul 31.