Venice film festival
Police pressure throws into crisis the tenderly portrayed relationship of two young men coming of age in Bedfordshire town
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”.
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