LONDON-BASED artist and filmmaker Imran Perretta has been selected for Bafta Breakthrough, a programme supported by Netflix in the UK that provides emerging talent in film, television and games with mentoring, industry introductions and career development opportunities.
Perretta’s debut feature film Ish won the Audience Award at Venice Critics’ Week in 2025.
He said the recognition came at an important point in his career as he moved from visual art into the film industry.
In an interview with Eastern Eye, Perretta, 37, said, “My career has largely been in the art world, so stepping into the film world marks the beginning of a new journey for me.
“The recognition feels amazing on a personal level, but it is also about entering the industry and gaining a foothold. That is particularly important to me, because my career has been in a different creative field.”
Previous Asian talents selected for Bafta Breakthrough include actors Riz Ahmed, Mawaan Rizwan and Ambika Mod, and filmmaker Asif Kapadia.
Participants receive a year of professional support, industry introductions and career development opportunities, as well as access to Bafta events and screenings.
A still from IshEastern Eye
The initiative aims to help creatives build sustainable careers in the screen industries.
Perretta, who grew up in south London with a Bangladeshi mother and an Italian father, said he experienced “intense racism and bigotry” during his childhood.
His Luton-set film, Ish, is a coming-ofage drama inspired by his own teenage years. It was screened in the first feature competition at the BFI London Film Festival in October.
It follows two 12-year-old best friends, Ish (Farhan Hasnat) and Maram (Yahya Kitana), as they play football, enjoy gaming and spend time together.
However, their relationship changes after a police stop-and-search incident in which Maram is searched while Ish runs away. The encounter affects their friendship and forces the boys to confront questions about identity and belonging.
While Perretta described his experience of making Ish as positive, he noted the financial and practical constraints filmmakers face.
Support from organisations such as Netflix, the BBC and the British Film Institute was essential, he said, adding that filmmakers needed resources and an established infrastructure to turn ideas into finished work.
“To get projects made, you need access to that infrastructure… and industry support,” he said.
Perretta said adequate backing should allow filmmakers to take creative risks rather than encourage them to reproduce established formulas.
Through Bafta Breakthrough, he hopes to explore ways of bringing experimentation into forms of media that reach mainstream audiences.
He is particularly interested in how television drama and other episodic formats could be developed beyond their existing conventions.
Perretta also sees mentorship as an opportunity to reflect on his own practice rather than simply follow another filmmaker’s example.
“I am interested in understanding what a career in this industry looks like,” he said.
Perretta has an established career in contemporary art. His work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, Somerset House, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.
He was nominated for the Jarman Award in 2019 and received a Turner Prize Bursary in 2020 for his moving-image work The Destructors.
In 2023, Perretta received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Artist Award.
His recent work brought together visual art and music. His exhibition A Riot in Three Acts opened at Somerset House before travelling to HOME in Manchester. It included a large-scale installation and A Requiem for the Dispossessed, a new piece of music for string quartet commissioned and performed by Manchester Camerata.
Perretta said he wants to explore how different creative forms can work together rather than treating visual art, music and film as separate disciplines.
“I am willing to push its visual language and references in new directions,” he said.
“I want to explore how they can be bent and make them more poetic or magical. Perhaps social realism can become a form of magical realism.”
He pointed to American filmmaker Spike Lee as an example of someone whose work combines political themes with experimentation and imagination.
“Ultimately, if someone’s work speaks to me, I will engage with it deeply,” he said.
Perretta’s longer-term ambition is to continue working as a filmmaker for as long as possible. “I think about people such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, who have continued making films into their 80s,” he said.
He urged aspiring filmmakers from Asian and other minority backgrounds to tell stories as they see them rather than shape their work around expectations of what their communities should look like.
“The best thing to do is tell your story as you see it and worry about the audience later,” he said.
