Ish: Imran Perretta’s remarkably beautiful film captures the brutal challenges of adolescence A police stop-and-search creates a rupture in the friendship between two Luton teens in this memorable evocation of childhood’s end. You wonder whether Imran Perretta was thinking of Kes (1969) when he gave a three-letter name to his own film about a painful childhood. Ish might, to a degree, be categorised as British realism in the classic Loachian tradition – not least in its casting of young nonprofessionals. But in his first feature, director Perretta – co-writing here with playwright Enda Walsh – finds his own distinct approach to the contemporary multiracial British everyday. You could call Ish a coming-of-age story. But if that tag tends to suggest a completed process, this film depicts the start of a gradual change: coming of age as a fall from the grace of childhood, and an induction into the potentially brutal challenges of adolescence. The film’s opening section presents an image of boyhood as earthly paradise. Two boys, Ish and Maram, explore a wood near their Luton home, pick blackberries, build a play camp, revel in the nature that surrounds them: with the treetops swaying in Ish’s POV, it is a fragile utopia of dappled ruralism and of immediate connection, with the world and with each other. Perretta has cast two 12-year-olds, long-standing friends in reality; hence the brisk, seemingly telepathic energy to their interplay: Farhan Hasnat as the diminutive, wide-eyed Ish, Yahya Kitana as Palestinian-British Maram. The latter looks and acts older and tougher, speaking modern British patois with the sort of inflections and accent – an Asian-Caribbean-Cockney hybrid – that can’t easily be faked by actors. Maram wants to be a peer of the older boys in the neighbourhood, who for Ish are just that – older, a different