At 12 years old, Ish learns about the realities of racism in Britain. One afternoon, Ish (Farhan Hasnat) and his best friend, Maram (Yahya Kitana), are strolling down an empty street in Luton when a police van ambushes them from behind. Ish, a British-Bangladeshi kid, sprints along the pavement until he’s out of sight. However, Maram, a British-Palestinian boy, is thrown inside the van, where he’s viciously interrogated because of the colour of his skin. Feeling betrayed, Maram ends his friendship with Ish.

Imran Perretta, the British-Bangladeshi director of Ish, was also racially profiled as a 13-year-old. The difference is that Perretta, who’s now 37, was the young boy taken inside the van – it was his friend who ran away. “I’m still figuring out how I feel about the film,” Perretta tells me at the BFI Southbank, in early July. “At times it feels cathartic. Other times, it feels super-heavy. It’s from my life. But I hope people can relate to the more zoomed-out themes, even if they haven’t been stopped and searched themselves.”

Ish isn’t a typical coming-of-age drama. Shot in black-and-white and accompanied by orchestral music, Perretta’s directorial debut prioritises visual poetry over frenetic storytelling. At the same time, Ish is incredibly modern and politically charged: Ish and Marah absorb news reports about the bombing in Gaza; the leads, who are clearly given free rein with their dialogue, behave like actual kids. A hypnotic hymn to youthful curiosity, it’s uncoincidentally lensed by Jermaine Canute Edwards, the same cinematographer behind My Father’s Shadow. In the forest, the handheld camera follows the boys as they cycle, pick blackberries, and create their own adventures; in the city centre, innocent walks are often framed through police surveillance footage and face recognition software.

Ish has already been repeatedly compared to La Haine, a reference Perretta calls “a bit lazy but flattering”. He lists some more apt influences: Ratcatcher, The Selfish Giant, and Kes; in other answers, he mentions The 400 Blows and the Apu trilogy. However, none of those were screened to the child actors, all of whom were first-timers. (Ish’s older sister is played by musician Joy Crookes, who is also making her acting debut.) In fact, the cast were usually given their dialogue the morning they were shot. “I wanted them to have a good night’s sleep,” the director says. “I wanted them to not worry about what it was they were going to do.”

“Maybe there's a looseness from me because I went to art school instead of film school. I don’t feel bound by any rules, because I don’t know what the rules are. I’m just making it up”

Perretta has primarily worked in the contemporary art world. A Turner Prize Bursary winner, he held workshops with young British Muslims that led to a 2019 exhibition titled ‘the destructors’; on two screens, local teens in Tower Hamlets spoke about their experiences of Islamophobia. With Enda Walsh (Die My Love, Hunger), Perretta wrote Ish, an unofficial continuation of the destructors. Is his background as an artist why Ish feels so thrillingly unconventional?

“A lot of that is the boys, and the film needing to follow their chemistry,” he says. “Maybe there's a looseness from me because I went to art school instead of film school. I don’t feel bound by any rules, because I don’t know what the rules are. I’m just making it up. There’s a power in trusting what you see in front of your eyes in real time, rather than harkening back to what someone told you. If you’re alive to what’s in front of you, you can’t go wrong.”

Born in Streatham and resident there to this day, Perretta shot Ish in Luton as a result of visiting family in the area. In monochrome, the town’s dusty streets transform into timeless backdrops; the endless chalk grasslands possess a hint of sci-fi; the kids mess around with bumper cars, fireworks, and other activities heightened by a stark palette. “With colour, you feel the urban decay of Luton,” the director explains. “But black-and-white flatters the concreteness and gives it a special, cinematic, classical environment. Even the M1 looks beautiful in black-and-white. It gives this formalist gaze to a town that’s been forgotten.”

Likewise, Perretta experimented with medieval folk music as a temp score when editing Ish. While unsure why anachronistic sounds suited the film, he knew it was undeniable. “Coming from art school, there’s no division of labour. If you want an orchestral score for your film, you have to do it yourself. I’m glad I did the soundtrack for Ish. It almost killed me, but I knew exactly what I wanted.” Confounded by how to write his first-ever screenplay, Perretta wrote musical cues before a draft was completed. “I think about the words, the images, and the sounds in the wrong order. I don’t know any other way to do it.”

Although Ish is based on an event that occurred nearly two decades ago, it unfolds in the present. “It felt natural to set it in the modern day because nothing has changed politically,” says Perretta. “In my day, 9/11 was this big, inciting incident for the way certain communities were seen as suspects. But 25 years later, things have gotten worse. The geopolitical situation we find ourselves in now – with the war in Iran, the genocide in Gaza, all that sort of stuff – we can trace a through-line from the War on Terror and 9/11. The fallout of the foreign policy from that time is unfolding right in front of our eyes now. If you go back in history, it’s a continuation of colonial struggle.”

“The geopolitical situation we find ourselves in now – with the war in Iran, the genocide in Gaza, all that sort of stuff – we can trace a through-line from the War on Terror and 9/11”

The BBC and BFI were involved in the financing of the film. They didn’t push back against the film’s political leanings? “No, they emboldened me to express myself as politically and fully as I wanted to. It’s the reality the boys exist in. They encounter the news the same way that adults do. They have a cultural or direct familial relationship to the ongoing genocide in Palestine. And so do I. That feeling can affect different parts of your life. On a local level, it’s the police paying a disproportionate amount of attention to these young brown boys. When you understand how you’re seen by the state, it changes who you are – or certainly how you feel about yourself.”

Ish is in UK & Irish cinemas now, and is part of BFI FAN’s UK-wide season “Rip It Up”, which explores the changing face of youth rebellion, culture, and expression, on now until 31 Oct.