‘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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Who was Muriel Box, Britain’s most prolific female film director?

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She was also the first woman to win an Oscar for best original screenplay. Now a new radio documentary aims to give her pioneering work a fresh appraisal

In 1991, as a film student, I was offered £50 by a German women’s collective to shoot Muriel Box. But when the documentary director and I arrived at her home we were told that she was too ill to see us. She died a few months later aged 85. While I regret never meeting her, I’m also relieved. How terrible to have shown even a glimpse of my full ignorance of her achievements, a pioneering film-maker who had fought her way through an industry hostile to women to make a major contribution to cinema.

Box directed 13 feature films in the 1950s and early 60s and remains Britain’s most prolific female director. Her titles, made for a mainstream audience, include The Passionate Stranger, an imaginative retort to the romance novel, which boldly experiments with form; the controversial juvenile courtroom drama Too Young to Love; and Box’s favourite, The Truth About Women, an eclectic tapestry of the complex lives of women.

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