A period movie with a twist, The Last Tree is the coming-of-age story of a boy struggling to find his identity in both the English countryside in which he’s raised and the Nigerian shantytown of his birth
Shola Amoo sits outside a cafe on a sun-blazed afternoon, a man with something up his sleeve. Imagine a
British period movie and what you picture may not look like The Last Tree, the film he has written and directed. But that is what it is: set in the early 00s, an era whose signifiers are as precise as steam trains or bonnets – a CD Walkman and a tiny Nokia used to make calls, in a story set in rural Lincolnshire, south
London and Lagos, Nigeria.
“I’m not sure a film like this has been a thing in British cinema before,” Amoo says, genial and self-contained. “But it’s a thing now.”