Ish review – a vital coming-of-age tale

While planes roar overhead on their way to or from nearby Luton Airport, Ish (Farhan Hasnat) and his best friend Maram (Yahya Kitana) ride their bikes through the suburbs in search of summer diversions. As the holidays stretch out in front of them, so too do their imaginations: in the scrubland they build aden out of branches, and in the woods they pick fresh blackberries, delighting in their haul as they gleefully carry them in Ish’s T‑shirt. But life seems to constantly encroach on their dreamland. While Ish comes to terms with the recent death of his mother, Maram, who is Palestinian, contends with the Israeli occupation and assault on Gaza. Both boys would prefer to just muck about and pretend everything’s fine while they watch TikToks and tease each other, but they soon aren’t presented with much of achoice.

Imran Perretta, amultimedia artist, poet and musician making his feature debut with Ish, demonstrates adeft and gentle hand with his young protagonists, who are forced to grow up fast in asociety that has been particularly hostile to Muslims since the 9/11 attack and the War on Terror emboldened both the government and the public to view them as ​“the other”. Ish and Maram are at first idly aware of this, but the racism they face as non-white children in aBritish town quickly has very real consequences. While cycling home together one evening, the boys are pursued by the police under their stop and search policy, widely known to disproportionately target black and Asian or mixed individuals. While Ish manages to hide, Maram is bundled into the back of apolice van. When he emerges, clearly traumatised, he feels understandably betrayed by Ish. Of course neither boy is in the wrong here – Ish is younger, smaller and just as scared as Maram, and Maram hasn’t done anything wrong. It’s apertinent example of the institutional racism all but given amandate in the United Kingdom.

Their friendship changes after this. Maram starts hanging with his older friends and is furious at Ish for abandoning him. Ish struggles with the sudden loss of his best mate and the strange environment at home, where his sister has been forced to shoulder more responsibility since their mother’s death. Meanwhile, news of Israel’s continued violence against Palestine is heard in snippets – both material and ancestral home are hostile to Maram, and on the periphery is Ish, too young to fully comprehend the gravity of the situation.

Perretta makes the leap to film director with impressive ease, his vision confident and compassionate, echoing the work of Shane Meadows in its sensitive but never condescending portrait of childhood from achild’s point of view. This is undoubtedly made possible by the astonishingly thoughtful performances of newcomers Hasnat and Kitana, absolute naturals on screen in their cheeky, precocious way. Perhaps most crucially, Ish and Maram aren’t presented as saints; they’re flawed and flippant, as all kids are. But there’s aspecificity to Perretta’s film, speaking directly to the experience of young Asian and Muslim men in England, particularly since the millennium.