‘It was the moment I lost innocence’: how a childhood stop-and-search led to the British debut movie of the year

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When Imran Perretta was young, he was abruptly pulled by police into a van for questioning. That experience, as well as the death of his mother, inspired him to make Ish, a coming-of-age tale set amongst the British Muslim community. He talks about trauma, designing toilets and making Luton look magnificent Imran Perretta always knew that the title of his debut feature film would be “Ish” – short for Ishmail, the name of the 12-year-old boy from Luton at the heart of his story. Only later did people point out the similarity to other coming-of-age films with three letters in the title: Kes by Ken Loach, and Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy. Now, as the reviews trickle in, the comparisons to Kes and Apu keep coming. Like them, Ish is a poetic film that grabs you by the heart and pulls you into a child’s perspective on the world. The response has been lovely, says Perretta, and a relief. “It’s nice that people have compared Ish to those films rather than Kidulthood. I did worry about that.” Why...
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The Narrow Road review – tough times for the downtrodden in pandemic Hong Kong

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After deciding it’s time to seek help with his cleaning business, despairing Chak meets the zanily upbeat Candy

Set in Hong Kong during the early days of the pandemic, Lam Sum’s tender drama pictures a city haunted by economic and political uncertainty. Storefronts are plastered with foreclosure and bankruptcy notices, while talk of moving abroad hovers amid everyday conversations. Plagued by faulty equipment, the one-man sanitary service operated by world-weary Chak (played by Cantopop star Louis Cheung) is on the verge of breaking down. When asked by his ailing mother if God is telling him to give up the business, Chak self-deprecatingly describes himself as a speck of dust, so tiny that even the deities would not take notice.

Reluctantly hired as an extra pair of helping hands on his cleaning rounds, single-mom Candy (Angela Yuen) enters Chak’s life like a whirlwind of chaos. With her impossibly sunny attitude and colourful fashion sense, Candy could have come off as a manic pixie archetype; Yuen instead manages to lend an emotional weight to the character’s capricious quirkiness. A particularly devastating sequence finds the pair scrubbing the human-shaped stain left by a nameless soul who has died alone in squalor, another speck of dust forgotten by the outside world.

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