MARRAKECH (Morocco), Dec 2: When Dhiraj Mahey and his team sent out an open call for talent last year to play a ‘South Asian’-origin boy in their new film, little did they know their movie would soon become a movement.
“We received 1,000 audition tapes,” beams Mahey, a British-Indian producer with roots in Uttar Pradesh, about the remarkable response to their project featuring a bevy of brown-skinned children.
The film, modestly titled Ish, was about South Asian children growing up in England amidst racism and phobia against the community today.
Racism was something Mahey knew about as a teenager in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, when anti-immigrant riots traumatised children like him from the vast South Asian community in the country.
“I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s in England facing racism. We thought the new generation didn’t have to go through it,” explains Mahey. Instead, he found out that racism was back with greater venom, along with state surveillance of immigrants.
“Our film is about how certain communities in the United Kingdom face more state surveillance than others,” says Mahey, who lives in London. “There is more surveillance of the Asian community. And the Muslim community is one of the most-surveilled communities in the United Kingdom.”
Ish, produced by Mahey’s London-based Primal Pictures along with BBC, among others, tells the story of boyhood friendship. Set in Luton, a town close to North London with a sizable population of immigrants from South Asia, the film had its world premiere in the Critics’ Week parallel selection at the Venice Film Festival in September this year.
The English-Bengali language film is part of the prestigious competition section at the 22nd edition of the Marrakech International Film Festival in Morocco, vying for its top prize, the Golden Star. Hindi film Homebound, directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, is the only Indian film in the official selection at the Marrakech festival this year.
The competition section of the Marrakech festival, which kicked off on November 28, is headed by South Korean director Bong Joon Ho, the director of the Oscar-winning film Parasite. Bollywood films and its stars are hugely popular in Morocco, a North African country geographically far away from the Indian subcontinent.
Directed by Bangladeshi-origin filmmaker Imran Perretta, Ish focuses on the strong bond between 12-year-old friends Ishmail and Maram. Ishmail belongs to a family of Bangladeshi immigrants, while Maram is the son of a Palestinian couple in Luton.
The friendship between Ishmail, who is affectionately called Ish by his family and friends, and Maram is tested in the wake of a stop-and-search by the police one day when the friends are out in the street.
“The film explores friendship and masculinity and loss of innocence,” says Mahey, who decided to produce the film after discovering the similarities between the film script and director Perretta’s personal experience as a Bangladeshi-origin young man in Luton.
“The film is drawn from Imran Perretta’s personal experience. He had a stop-and-search incident in the United Kingdom following the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States,” says Mahey, whose previous productions include a raft of short films made in the past two decades.
Ishmail is played by Farhan Hasnat, a boy from a Bangladeshi-origin family, and Maram by Yahya Kitana, one from a Palestinian family. “All the adolescent children in the film are played by local boys from Luton,” says Mahey. “They are all playing a version of themselves.”
Shot in black and white, the 90-minute film, executive-produced by BBC Film, British Film Institute (BFI), and Good Chaos Productions, among others, employs a subtle visual language to reflect the tensions felt within the South Asian community from increasing racism and Islamophobia.
A visual artist, Perretta makes his directorial debut with Ish, which won the British Independent Film Award for Breakthrough Producer for Mahey last week, an honour that recognises the cultural impact of the film on British society.
Since its world premiere in Venice, where it won the Audience Award in the Critics’ Week section, the film has been warmly welcomed by audiences in Europe, which has been reeling from a wave of racism and hate against immigrants in countries like the United Kingdom and Germany.
Mahey brought together a group of highly professional talent for the film’s cast and crew from within the South Asian community in the United Kingdom, including actor Sudha Buchar, the founder of the London-based Tamasha Theatre Company, who plays the role of Ishmail’s grandmother.
Ish, a highlight of the BFI London Film Festival in October, also picked up nominations for Breakthrough Performance for its lead actors Hasnat and Kitana at the British Independent Film Awards.
“The geopolitics has a direct impact on brown people in the United Kingdom today,” says Mahey, referring to the war in Gaza, the impact of which, especially on children of immigrant families, resonates through the movie. “Ish is a social document of our times.”
(UNI)
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