Ish review: Acting newcomers shine in immersive coming-of-age story
Ish won the People’s Choice Award at the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week last year and it’s easy to see why. This is a remarkable and deeply personal debut from filmmaker and artist Imran Perretta, with two outstanding first-time child actors.
Shot in black and white, the film follows the titular Ish (Farhan Hasnat), a 12-year-old boy who is mourning the death of his mother, and his best friend Maram (Yahya Kitana) as they roam around their hometown of Luton during the school holidays. Maram, who is much taller and looks older than Ish, starts hanging out with other boys and Ish reluctantly tags along, causing trouble around town to fit in. Ish and Maram’s friendship is irrevocably changed one day when one of them is pulled into a police van for a stop-and-search.
Perretta, who co-wrote the script with Enda Walsh and also composed the score, does a fantastic job of immersing the audience in their world and showing us Luton from their perspective. We basically just follow them as they go about their days, making it all the more shocking when the stop-and-search happens. It feels like a very realistic and grounded depiction of the British Muslim community and the racial profiling people of colour endure on the streets, and it has an observational quality that makes it feel almost like a documentary.
Ish, which is based on Perretta’s own stop-and-search experience as a teenage boy, is quite hard to understand at first. The boys speak in modern slang that feels very natural and perhaps improvised, but it took a while for my ears to lock into their way of speaking. Perretta auditioned 900 boys to find Ish and Maram and he discovered two gems with Hasnat and Kitana, who are friends in real life. This bond lends itself enormously to their easy friendship on-screen and adds a layer of authenticity to the characters.
The film is a wonderful coming-of-age story about learning who you are and what you want, who your friends are and falling in with the wrong crowd and finding a way out. Over the course of the film, Ish learns to appreciate his family – father (Avin Shah), grandmother (Sudha Bhuchar) and sister Samira (Joy Crookes) – and realises they’re actually good company and he doesn’t have to be out of the house all the time.
Ish is one of the best British debuts of the year so far and I predict plenty of BIFA nominations in its future.
Ish is in cinemas from Friday 31st July and on BFI Player from 7th September