Friendships are rent asunder, and handsome monochrome renders multicultural British life in arrestingly enigmatic tones, in Ish. Having played in the First Feature Competition at the 2025 BFI London Film Festival, Ish marks the feature film debut of Bangladeshi-Italian artist-turned-director Imran Perretta, who channels memories of his own adolescent pain into this stark yet redemptive story.

Key to the film’s success is its casting. Talented newcomer Farhan Yasnat portrays the titular ‘Ish’ (short for Ishmail), a young Luton boy poised on the cusp between childhood naivete and the kind of adult complexities that he is incapable of perceiving fully. Yasnat is perfect for the role: wide-eyed and innocent enough to sell the fallibility of the character, yet old enough that we can see life visibly mapping its cynical impact on the contours of his face. The truncated nature of the film’s title reminds us that, in an emotional sense, Ish remains half-formed.

Grieving the loss of his mother, Ish has seen his family deteriorate into dysfunctionality: his father Naeem (Avin Shah) has retreated into work, his older sister Samira (actor and singer Joy Crookes) is occasionally on hand to dispense strict discipline (what little that remains courtesy of the increasingly rebellious Ish’s behaviour), and his loving grandmother Nanu (the wonderful actor/playwright Sudha Bhuchar) dispenses sage advice while sneaking ciggies in the back garden.

At the heart of the film is Ish’s relationship with his best friend Maram (Yahya Kitana), a British-Palestinian kid whom he dubs ‘cousin’. The older and more impetuous Maram splits his loyalties between Ish and a group of decidedly more truculent kids with whom Ish is vainly trying to ingratiate himself.

Real-world horrors swirl in the background, both domestic and international, from Maram’s difficult relationship with his father to the barbarities of the ongoing war in Gaza. A traumatic yet disturbingly everyday instance of racial profiling on an average Luton street, however, sends the lives of both boys in wildly different directions, further exacerbated by Ish’s cowardly, though somewhat understandable, actions in the heat of the moment.

Perretta shares script duties with noted playwright and screenwriter Enda Walsh, himself a veteran of hard-hitting dramas like Steve McQueen‘s Hunger. As with that film, pragmatic realities are offset with dreamy surrealism, although a more accurate touchstone might be the films of Lynne Ramsay, in particular her early success Ratcatcher. The opening scene of Ish, which captures our title character and Maram in their makeshift woodland den, veers from naturalistic intimacy to poetic expression when a passenger plane is seen scything through a gap in the trees.

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There are several other such instances in Perretta’s movie, calling to mind not just Ramsay but a raft of British social realist filmmakers who blur the lines between subjective and objective. One can also sense the impact of Shane Meadows and Clio Barnard on the striking, beautifully captured scenes of freewheeling teenagers on bikes, or the cognitive overload of reckless kids unleashing a horde of fireworks in the middle of the woods at night. Cinematographer Jermaine Canute Edwards’s visuals are key here: the monochrome look seems to convey the melancholic weight of memory, a difficult childhood seen through a haze where the moral distinctions are anything but black and white.

The film’s bolder moments are, perhaps unsurprisingly, underpinned by a debt to the likes of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. The film’s depiction of Luton’s febrile racial climate is on the Loach end, whereas the fracturing family dynamics will call to mind Leigh. However, Perretta coalesces all of these disparate influences into a vision that is very much his own, aided and abetted by his own score that mixes lyrical expression with tough discordance.

Like everything else in the film, the music never remains settled for too long: angular tension is always ready to cut in, but the film finds pleasing grace notes of redemption in the open-ended destinies of its young male protagonists. The film reminds us that even if one is marked by racial disharmony, one need not be defined by it.