Debut film Ish confronts UK stop-and-search trauma
Imran Perretta’s debut feature "Ish" is drawing comparisons to British cinema classics while forcing a public reckoning with the trauma of police stop-and-searches on children.
"Ish", directed by artist Imran Perretta, has premiered to widespread acclaim, with critics comparing the Luton-set drama to Ken Loach’s "Kes". The film follows 12-year-old Ishmail and his friend Maram during their final summer of boyhood. It captures a specific community navigating grief and the encroaching adult world.
The narrative hinges on a pivotal event: Ish being stopped and searched by police. Perretta, who co-wrote the film with Irish playwright Enda Walsh, based the scene on his own experience at age 13 in the climate following the 9/11 attacks. “That was 100% the moment in my childhood when I lost my innocence,” Perretta says. “I understood I was seen as a deviant or some sort of threat.”
The film deliberately tackles a systemic issue, drawing unspoken parallels to recent UK controversies like the Child Q case and government Prevent strategy interviews conducted without guardians present. “It happens to children from certain backgrounds more than others. I wanted to explore what it means to drag children into the adult world before their time,” Perretta says. By setting the film in Luton—a town frequently associated in the media with extremism or far-right figures like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon—Perretta challenges prevailing narratives about British commuter towns.
The transition from gallery walls to the screen highlights an unusual pipeline in British filmmaking. Rose Garnett, then head of BBC Film, approached Perretta to develop a treatment after seeing his 2019 video installation, The Destructors, which is currently showing at Tate Britain. The production was anchored locally, spending five weeks shooting in Luton and auditioning roughly 900 local boys to find its two young leads.
Shot in luminous monochrome, the film’s visual style is a direct response to the town's economic reality. “When you shot in colour, you immediately felt the fact that it had been at the sharp end of austerity,” Perretta explains. The black-and-white palette grants the concrete surroundings a sense of grandeur, stripping away the visual markers of municipal neglect.
For European audiences, "Ish" represents a shift in how British cinema processes the legacy of counter-terrorism policing and austerity. Perretta is relieved critics are framing his work alongside poetic realism rather than the gritty urban drama "Kidulthood". The distinction matters: "Ish" is not a tale of youth criminality, but a quiet indictment of a society that forces children out of childhood prematurely.
