Shola Amoo: ​‘The media’s depic­tion of black­ness needs con­stant analysis’

In 2016 Shola Amoo announced him­self as a vital new voice in British cin­e­ma with his debut fea­ture A Mov­ing Image, about gen­tri­fi­ca­tion in Brix­ton. His fol­low-up, The Last Tree, is a sim­i­lar­ly impas­sioned and angst-rid­den tale of com­ing-of-age, spread out across sev­er­al years and three dis­tinct loca­tions: Lin­colnshire, South Lon­don and Lagos. It fol­lows Femi, as played by Tai Gold­ing and, lat­er on in the film, Sam Adewun­mi, a British-Niger­ian boy fos­tered to a white fam­i­ly who embarks on an often emo­tion­al­ly fraught jour­ney of self-dis­cov­ery against a con­stant­ly shift­ing cul­tur­al backdrop.

Draw­ing from his own expe­ri­ence, as well as that of sev­er­al of his peers and numer­ous sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion immi­grants inter­viewed for the film, Amoo has craft­ed a sen­si­tive and time­ly por­trait of black British iden­ti­ty and mas­culin­i­ty that feels like a refresh­ing coun­ter­point to the grit­ty urban real­ism of ear­li­er break­out hits such as Bul­let Boy and Kidult­hood. We sat down with the writer/​director to dis­cuss the per­son­al nature of his work, and the impor­tance of chal­leng­ing nar­row and neg­a­tive media-per­pet­u­at­ed stereo­types of blackness.

LWLies: The Last Tree looks at the way peo­ple are con­di­tioned by their cul­tur­al sur­round­ings. Could you talk a lit­tle about the sig­nif­i­cance of space and loca­tion in the film?

Loca­tion is key to every­thing I do. What’s real­ly inter­est­ing in The Last Tree is how each loca­tion leaves an imprint on Femi – each place gives him ques­tions around iden­ti­ty that he has to inves­ti­gate, and that enables him to even­tu­al­ly grow as the nar­ra­tive devel­ops. The film is semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal; specif­i­cal­ly I relate to being in a racial­ly mono­chro­mat­ic space that’s rur­al and mov­ing to a more cul­tur­al­ly mixed inner-city envi­ron­ment, and the dis­so­nance that comes with that. I also spoke to a lot of oth­er peo­ple who were fos­tered to get their tes­ti­monies. The nar­ra­tive that you see if a com­bi­na­tion of that with my own expe­ri­ence. Ren­der­ing the nar­ra­tive across three very dif­fer­ent land­scapes real­ly enabled me to high­light the stark dif­fer­ences in that pur­suit of identity.

And you were able to actu­al­ly film in Lagos.

Yeah, that was real­ly impor­tant and we were very lucky to be able to get out there. The scenes in Lin­colnshire were shot in a place called ​‘the wash’, which is essen­tial­ly the sea at low-tide, which is why it’s almost sur­re­al­ly flat. So it was inter­est­ing to then be able to shoot the final scene on that beach in Lagos, with a lit­er­al sea full of water that at the same time feels very open like the fields of Lincolnshire.

There are sev­er­al recog­nis­able loca­tions in the South Lon­don por­tion of the film, like East Street Mar­ket. Is there a per­son­al con­nec­tion to these places for you?

Oh yeah, East Street Mar­ket, Dept­ford High Street and the Ayles­bury Estate in par­tic­u­lar were super impor­tant. Ayles­bury was an inter­est­ing one because it’s not an estate known for let­ting peo­ple shoot on it – there’s a long his­to­ry of estates in South Lon­don like Ayles­bury and Hey­gate being demonised in the media, so they’re under­stand­ably wary of how they’re por­trayed. But I’d worked on the Ayles­bury Estate for many years as a com­mu­ni­ty work­er and it’s 10 min­utes from my house, so they trust­ed that I wasn’t going to por­tray it in a neg­a­tive light. Shoot­ing there was essen­tial to the sto­ry and it was vital shoot­ing in an actu­al flat on the estate as opposed to recre­at­ing one elsewhere.

Femi has a com­plex rela­tion­ship with his bio­log­i­cal moth­er; he’s much clos­er to his white fos­ter moth­er. How does that relate to your own experience?

From my per­spec­tive, it’s that dis­tance between first-gen­er­a­tion and sec­ond- or third-gen­er­a­tion immi­grants that I’m fas­ci­nat­ed in. What I real­ly want­ed to under­stand and show in the film is how dif­fi­cult a deci­sion it was for that first gen­er­a­tion to come over. It didn’t just mean leav­ing behind every­thing they knew but often involved mov­ing to an impov­er­ished envi­ron­ment and work­ing mul­ti­ple jobs to sup­port a fam­i­ly. For a lot of Nige­ri­ans who were fos­tered by white par­ents, that meant a bet­ter qual­i­ty of life; access to bet­ter edu­ca­tion. I want­ed to show a 360 degree view of that, because it’s a sit­u­a­tion which has been mis­rep­re­sent­ed too often.

That’s been brought into sharp­er focus recent­ly by events such as the Win­drush scandal.

Yeah. As a soci­ety we’re final­ly start­ing to come to terms with the sac­ri­fice that gen­er­a­tion made. I cer­tain­ly didn’t under­stand it for a long time grow­ing up. I took me a while to appre­ci­ate the full scale of the sit­u­a­tion. Mak­ing films has been very cathar­tic in that sense. A Mov­ing Image and The Last Tree have book­end­ed a real­ly impor­tant peri­od of my life, not just in terms of my per­son­al rela­tion­ships but also my rela­tion­ships to spe­cif­ic places, like South Lon­don, from an era that is now bygone. Many areas are dis­ap­pear­ing due to gen­tri­fi­ca­tion so it was a big deal to show them as they once were.

I want­ed to ask you about foot­ball. It’s a seem­ing­ly small detail in the film, but it feels like a cru­cial con­nect­ing point between the three dif­fer­ent locations.

Well, the film obvi­ous­ly deals quite direct­ly with black mas­culin­i­ty, but with­in that I want­ed to explore how foot­ball can be a uni­fy­ing game for peo­ple from all walks of life. Par­tic­u­lar­ly as a kid, you can prac­ti­cal­ly play it with any­one and that can be a real­ly vital bond­ing expe­ri­ence. When Femi moves from Lin­colnshire to Lon­don it pro­vides him with a moment of almost solace and peace. Every­thing else is quite fright­en­ing and new to him, but hav­ing a kick­about with some ran­dom kids feels instant­ly famil­iar. I also liked the idea of hav­ing this non-ver­bal, pure­ly phys­i­cal expres­sion of iden­ti­ty in the film. Foot­ball allows young men to bond with real­ly talk­ing [laughs].

Speak­ing of black mas­culin­i­ty, there’s a very ten­der, inti­mate moment in the film that chal­lenges our per­cep­tion of a key char­ac­ter. It’s quite refresh­ing to see the cur­tain being pulled back like that.

I refer to it often as the mask of mas­culin­i­ty. Espe­cial­ly at that time, the space for black mas­culin­i­ty was quite nar­row in terms of what you could do, who you could be. With the scene you’re refer­ring to, it’s a char­ac­ter who feels like they have to present them­selves in a cer­tain way in order to feel like they have any pow­er or author­i­ty. The places where that mask is up and where it slips is real­ly the main idea of the film. When you start to pull back the mask, you see peo­ple in a more two-dimen­sion­al sense – you get to see past this stereo­typ­i­cal image of black masculinity.

I read some­where that the cast is 90 per cent black, which feels like a rev­e­la­tion in the con­text of UK cinema.

That was super impor­tant to me, and what fur­ther com­pounds that is not only do you have me as a black writer/​director, you also have my cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, Stil Williams, my edi­tor, Mdhamiri Á Nke­mi, my com­pos­er, Segun Aki­no­la. I think that’s rar­er still. One of the things I real­ly want peo­ple to take away from this film isn’t just the sto­ry itself but the way we tell it: the lan­guage of the filmmaking.

From when the film is set, how do you think things have changed for young black men in this coun­try today?

It’s that frame of ref­er­ence, you know, of what is accept­able and what you can be as a young black man. When you com­pare how things are now com­pared to when this film is set, I think it’s def­i­nite­ly broad­ened, but there‘s still the issue of the media’s depic­tion of black­ness which I think needs con­stant analy­sis. We’re in this rep­re­sen­ta­tion age, and I think who­ev­er you are it’s impor­tant to try to under­stand oth­er people’s per­spec­tive and to put your­self into anoth­er person’s shoes. When I think about my con­tem­po­raries in the States, just the sym­bol­ic pow­er of Oba­ma is so inter­est­ing in terms of giv­ing young black men that frame of ref­er­ence of what they can be. In the UK I don’t think we’ve found that equiv­a­lent yet.

The Last Tree is released 27 Sep­tem­ber. Read the LWLies review.