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remiering at Venice Critics’ Week, where it won t
he 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 comingof-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.’” Imran Perretta, Enda Walsh and Dhiraj Mahey on making an award-winning debut WORDS Lauren Gallagher E ISH 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 39
