Artist, musician and film-maker Imran Perretta makes a really impressive feature-directing debut here, co-written by him and Enda Walsh, and shot in lustrous monochrome by cinematographer Jermaine Canute Edwards. It’s a poignant and poetic urban pastoral about young masculinity, Muslim and south Asian communities, and the seedy and insidious new petty harassment of racial profiling and facial recognition tech. The setting is the streets of Luton and the surrounding Bedfordshire woodlands near Wardown Park, under the airport flight path – at one stage a plane looms gigantically overhead like an alien spaceship – and sometimes beneath the cathedral floodlights of the Luton Town football ground, where visiting supporters chant “Luton’s a shithole, I want to go home!” (A more comic or sentimentally lenient film might have included a scene at the Eric Morecambe statue, but not this one.)
In some ways, Ish is a parallel and contested coming-of-age narrative about two boys whose diverging destinies are shown in the final sequence: they are coming of age, or perhaps it is rather that finally only one comes of age. Ishmail, or Ish, played by newcomer Farhan Hasnat, is a kid whose mum has just died and who can’t exactly process his own emotions or the suppressed emotions of the adults. He lives with his grandmother (Sudha Bhuchar), his dad Naeem (Avin Shah), who works at the airport, and his exasperated older sister Samira, played by singer-songwriter Joy Crookes. But the most important person in Ish’s life is his best mate Maram (Yahya Kitana), an older teen whom his grandmother calls the “Palestinian boy”.
Ish speaks English at home, and with Maram codeswitches to roadman-speak as they range far afield together all day long, sometimes doing bucolically innocent things such as collecting wild blackberries. The older Maram is angrier, warier, more alienated than Ish, and oppressed by his own taxi-driver dad. Maram is alive to the possibility of violent clashes with his “opps”, whom he calls “the IDF” (news of the Gaza situation is a background noise to their lives). Ish is hurt when Maram all but ignores him when they run into older, cooler boys at the pool or the fair, but at one crucial moment it is Ish who hurts Maram’s feelings – an ugly incident that the film shows is a defining moment in their lives. A police facial recognition van – apparently unmarked – pulls up behind Ish and Maram for a heavy-handed and unwarranted stop and search. The two of them run; Ish gets away but Maram is dragged into the van and then without apology turfed out.
The film shows that Maram is angry with Ish for running away and not facing down the law alongside him, but it shows also that he is angry with himself, humiliated first by being caught and then by being released. He is a kid, not important, not so different in fact from Ish. What do their masculinity and their (prospective) adulthood mean now? Perretta conveys that Ish and Maram are different personalities, and Ish has the benefit of a close relationship with his witty and wise grandmother. But they are also different by virtue of arbitrary fate: Maram is older, more set on a certain path. It is a complex, compassionate drama.
• Ish screened at the Venice film festival.
