Premiering at Venice Critics’ Week, where it won the People’s Choice Award, Ish is an assured debut feature from British artist and filmmaker Imran Perretta. Set within Luton’s South Asian community, the coming-of-age drama follows best friends Ish and Maram, whose relationship is strained after a traumatic incident of racial profiling by police. What begins as an intimate portrait of childhood friendship gradually unfolds into a nuanced exploration of grief, youth and the subtle ways political realities shape our everyday lives.
Ahead of its UK and Ireland release this summer, I spoke with Perretta, producer Dhiraj Mahey and acclaimed Irish playwright and screenwriter Enda Walsh. Best known for writing Disco Pigs and its subsequent film adaptation, Steve McQueen’s Hunger, the screen adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These and the musical adaptation of Once, Walsh has frequently collaborated with Cillian Murphy and most recently co-wrote Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson.
While Walsh’s involvement provides the film with a distinct Irish connection, Ish is unmistakably Perretta’s story: a film drawn from his own childhood experiences and developed through a collaboration that sought to preserve both its emotional intimacy and political honesty.
For Walsh, the project arrived unexpectedly. “I was going away on summer holidays and my agent gave me four or five books that people were interested in me adapting and he said, ‘Also there’s a script here, it’s an early draft from this guy Imran Perretta.’ I went, ‘Oh, is that the video artist guy?’ I thought, ‘That’s interesting.'”
Reading the script, Walsh immediately recognised something special. “I loved it. There were so many things in it that grabbed me and I just thought, this is really beautiful. And I could see a place for me to work with it.”
His first meeting with Perretta only reinforced that feeling. “I thought, ‘Fuck, I’ve worked with an artist before. What’s it going to be like? They can be incredibly egotistical and this could be an absolute disaster.’ Then I met him and I realised that actually he’s very, very open. He’s a really easy guy to work with. His sensibility is great. All his references for the film seemed to sort of clock with my sensibility around what he had written. Then we just got to work.”
Although the story unfolds within a community very different from his own North Dublin upbringing, Walsh found something immediately familiar within it. “I was interested in it because I’m an Irish man of a particular age, but the idea of making something in the [South Asian] community within Luton was just really interesting. I thought this is a fantastic opportunity for me to disappear, but also to reconnect with my thirteen-year-old self.”
If Walsh recognised something universal within Ish, Perretta had been carrying the story for much longer. “I think it was in the back of my mind for a long time,” he says. “It’s my debut in the film world, but I’ve been making work that’s been seen by the public, in the context of gallery exhibitions, for about a decade. So for me, it’s kind of like a continuation of that narrative, that exploration.”
Like many first features, Ish returns to adolescence and draws directly from the filmmaker’s own life. “I think there’s a tendency for a lot of debuts to be coming-of-age films and it makes a lot of sense, because ultimately what you do is you go back to your experience. It’s like a first album — you’ve kind of been writing it your whole life.”
For Perretta, that isn’t just a figure of speech. “I mean, nearly everything that happens in the film is something that happened to me. The central turn in the film happened to me when I was thirteen and these characters are the same age. It’s always lived with me. I always say it’s the moment that politicised me. So that was my coming of age, being in the back of a police car.”
He continues, “For me, this is that thing we spoke about, writing the story for my whole life. Coming to understand and navigate that moment has occupied me for the entirety of my adult life. I’ve finally, through Ish and through the work that I’ve been doing previously, found a language to begin to plumb the depths of that experience.”
That deeply personal foundation was something Walsh was conscious of throughout the writing process. Rather than reshaping the screenplay, he saw his role as protecting and refining what was already there.
“It was really natural. Honestly, it was all there. Although in my theatre I’m a maximalist, when it comes to film, all the films that I love are sparse and quiet. I felt my job was just to make sure that there’s space in it. Space for an audience to sit in it, and for the characters to be in it. Really, that was just the thing that I monitored all the way through it.”
Working alongside a first-time screenwriter also challenged Walsh’s own instincts. “He’s new to writing and I’ve been writing for ages, but sometimes there’s something about a new writer that can unlock something, or they do something that ordinarily I would go, ‘no, don’t do that,’ but then actually there’s some real fucking truth in it. So it’s good to be reminded of that.”
Although the film pivots around a stop-and-search encounter, neither Perretta nor Mahey ever saw Ish as a story that separated politics from ordinary life.
“People’s intimate and political lives play out in such a nuanced, multi-layered and ordinary way in real life,” Perretta says. “The job of Ish was to basically just do a faithful portrait of that. It wasn’t to make it any bigger or smaller than it was. In the lives of those boys, it’s a massive moment. The job was to honour the texture of how our political lives and our intimate lives are inexorable from each other.”
That approach was one of the reasons Perretta had wanted to work with Walsh in the first place. “To talk about Enda and his work, that was always something that I was blown away by. I was a big fan of Enda before we wrote this together. There was something about his sensibility, his way of talking about a greater political condition through the lives of his characters that was so deft and so impressive and so beautiful. That’s all I ever wanted to do.”
Dhiraj Mahey, who was nominated for breakthrough producer at the British Independent Film Awards 2025, says those conversations defined the project from the outset. “When Imran and I first met, that was the starting point. Imran was really interested in exploring and developing a story around stop-and-search and surveillance, but wrapping it up in something more personal. That notion of them being intertwined and one not existing without the other, it couldn’t be anything else in a way.”
Rather than positioning Ish as an isolated protagonist, the filmmakers were equally determined to foreground the community around him. “I think politically it’s important to show collectivity,” Perretta says. “It’s important to show that this individual, Ish, existed because of and in the midst of a community that all live in a sort of hostile environment together but all have carved a loving niche for themselves.”
For Perretta, that wasn’t simply a narrative decision, but part of the film’s wider purpose. “Whilst the film was named after the little boy who is at the centre of it, it was always going to be about the community that surrounded him, including his family, because I think that’s part of the political project of the work. It’s saying we are a collective; come what may, if one of us suffers we all suffer, if one of us prospers we all prosper.”
That sense of community extended beyond the screenplay and into the casting process. The production auditioned hundreds of young men from Luton. “Actually, I think there was only one young man that had any acting experience. Just one. And he didn’t get the role in the end.” Perretta recalls.
After months of workshops, improvisations and screen tests, the filmmakers paired newcomers Farhan Hasnat and Yahya Kitana. “We put Yahya and Farhan together, those are the two boys that play Maram and Ish respectively, and it was just instant magic. It was absolutely electric straight away. Dhiraj and I were both in the room and it was just extraordinary. We were literally so quiet. I set them quite a complex improvisation and they dealt with it so beautifully.”
Only afterwards did Perretta and Mahey discover why the chemistry had felt so effortless. “We chatted to them afterwards and we were saying, ‘It’s like you boys have been mates forever.’ They were like, ‘Oh yeah, we have.’ We knew they went to the same school, but they played it so cool that we had no idea they were really close friends. It transpired that they’d known each other since they were in nursery. All of the chemistry in the film, that’s all real. It’s just a gift from the film gods.”
Mahey laughs remembering the moment. “It was that kind of twelve-year-old logic where they thought they shouldn’t tell us they knew each other because if they told us that might go against them somehow. They’d cooked up this whole imaginary scenario in their head. We were like, ‘No, no, no, this is actually good.'”
The friendship at the centre of Ish may be rooted in a specific community, but many of the adolescent experiences it explores are universal. For Walsh, that was always one of the screenplay’s greatest strengths. “It’s like feeling heartache for the first time, when you lose a friend and you don’t understand why and you just drift apart. It gets all of that right.”
Although Ish is set against a backdrop of racial profiling, Perretta was never interested in treating politics and emotion as separate ideas.
“Humans, or people as political subjects, cannot be divorced from people as family members, friends, members of a community. We all operate on all those levels simultaneously.”
As the script developed, Mahey found that another idea gradually emerged. “On a much more micro level, what evolved more clearly and was articulated to ourselves more through the development process was the micro of that. In a way, it is a story about friendship and masculinity and how, as you grow up, you might grow apart.”
For Mahey, that became the film’s emotional centre. “There was this notion that your first best friend is your first love. Your breakup with your first best friend is your first heartbreak. I think that’s something we could all relate to.”
Words: Lauren Gallagher
Ish opens in Irish cinemas on 31 July.
