Totally Dublin 1
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.” Ish opens in Irish cinemas on 31 July. photo: Ben Selmi 41
