Soldier boys: "Ish"

Silly season isn't the worst time for a British filmmaker to announce themselves with a forceful opening statement: at the very least, it affords us the opportunity to watch a creative daring to go against the flow and taking their chosen medium seriously, if not perhaps Nolan-seriously. The story the erstwhile visual artist Imran Perretta is telling with his debut feature Ish is, in many respects, a familiar one: it's that of two little boys coming of age the hard way. But Perretta brings to it new-ish strategies and station calls, new-ish lines of attack. For starters, he frames events in a snazzy, high-contrast black-and-white that recalls La Haine, that epochal coming-of-age tale, or - closer to home - Shane Meadows' tragicomic boxing saga TwentyFourSeven; and he's training his camera on the altogether underfilmed mean streets of Luton and its immediate environs. The first time we meet Perretta's boys - pint-sized British-Asian lad Ishmael, known as Ish (Farhan Hasnat) and his older, taller, curly-haired Arab pal Maram (Yahya Kitana) - they're biking into the woods to scrump handfuls of blackberries; the scene could be described as Edenic, were it not for the planes roaring overhead on the way to the airport where Ish's dad Naeem (Avin Shah) works a security detail. The fall here occurs once the boys are back on concrete, in an urban environment defined by sirens, fractious chatter, not quite broken but lopsided and fragile homes, and a pivotal police stop-and-search that drives a decisive wedge between the film's protagonists. Gather ye blackberries while ye may.

Here, Ish follows on from countless recent Britfilms, not least 2015's jolting stop-and-search documentary The Hard Stop. But the Britain of 2026 is not the same as the Britain of a decade ago; the world has changed, and this is the first feature I've seen to deploy the current state of play in the Middle East as a resonant plot point. On paper, granted, it sounds more than halfway goofy: overhearing the urgent sniping on talk radio and seeing the Palestinian flag flying nearby, Ish and Maram come to believe the conflict will spill over into their own backyard. You'd call them too young to know any better, except that the conflict does spill over, in a roundabout way: what Perretta is getting at is how our young internalise a world that appears to be ever more frantically border-policing, and in a state of near-constant conflict. Crucially, this filmmaker isn't a polemicist, rather an artist and a humanist: he observes that the stop-and-search, on an otherwise nondescript suburban backroad, merely accelerates a gradual, possibly organic severing of the bond between the two boys. Maram is falling in with an older, more boisterous crowd who leave their bikes at home to refocus their energies and attentions on cars and girls; when Ish flees the scene of the stop-and-search - leaving Maram at the mercy of the coppers - it's because he's scared, like the child he is, watching the streets that had previously been his playground transformed into a warzone, contested territory. It's "think global, act local" writ widescreen large: a drama that doesn't go anywhere near the West Bank, but which nevertheless sets us to thinking about power structures, allyship, courage, the choosing of sides.

Rather than approaching these subjects with a heavy hand, Perretta gathers small but telling incidents and interactions: Ish retains an appreciably anecdotal shape and feel, as if something like this happened to this filmmaker as a boy and has bugged him ever since. Making a movie about it twenty-odd years on allows him to flesh such incidents out, to try and see more sides of the story, and to stop beating himself up about it. (Most of the characters here are compromised or conflicted in some way, even if it's just Dad shaking people down at the airport to keep a roof over his family's head or Gran - a warm, wise turn from veteran Sudha Bhuchar - sneaking the odd cigarette.) There are sporadic overemphases, a few shortfalls in the prevailing empathy. It's a little on-the-nose that every TV and radio on screen should be tuned to news from Gaza, though this at least explains how the conflict gets into the boys' heads in the first place; and Perretta has no time whatsoever for the police, depicted as silent, faceless pursuers with Terminator-like tracking technology, as much a merciless machine as the IDF of the boys' nightmares. (The tracking sequences might as well flash "ACAB" in the corner of the screen.) But Ish has the craft to make even perversely localised conflict cinematic. This supporting cast collectively push for a depth beyond the reach of our primetime telly dramas; Perretta's self-composed score enhances the lyricism of his images; and cinematographer Jermaine Canute Edwards shoots it like one of Ray's Apu films, going not for prettifying sheen but well-lit, granular detail. Some part of it remains perverse: perhaps only an artist could have stopped to consider what effect a genocide in Gaza would have on the youth of Luton. But that very thoughtfulness, that leap of the creative imagination, proves central to a film that answers the age-old lament "won't somebody think of the children?" Perretta has, most persuasively.

Ish is now playing in selected cinemas.