The story of a British-Nigerian boy growing up in rural Lincolnshire and inner-city
London is told with compassion in Shola Amoo’s profoundly moving drama
Writer-director Shola Amoo’s “semi-autobiographical” second feature is an affecting coming-of-age tale pitched somewhere between the sublime
American poetry of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and the streetwise
British grit of Noel Clarke and Menhaj Huda’s Kidulthood movies. A huge leap forward from the experimental collages of 2016’s A Moving Image (which Amoo has accurately called a “feature-length, multimedia, visual-art project”), The Last Tree bristles with film-making confidence, plunging us into the world of its young protagonist as he struggles to find his place in a strangely changing environment. Powerful performances, tactile visuals and an elegantly fluid score add to the impact of this impressively understated yet profoundly moving tale.
We open in Lincolnshire, with a scene of bucolic beauty reminiscent of the dreamy field-of-corn sequence in Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher. Here, 11-year-old Femi (Tai Golding), a British boy of Nigerian heritage, lives with his English foster mother Mary (Denise Black). It’s an apparently idyllic existence, characterised by afternoons of exuberant mud-splattered play in the sun-dappled glow of the east coast countryside.