Totally Dublin 1
a particular age, but the idea of making somethin
g 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“The job was to honour the texture of how our political lives and our intimate lives are inexorable from each other.” photo: Ben Selmi 40
