The Last Tree

The con­cept of being uproot­ed – be it lit­er­al­ly or metaphor­i­cal­ly – lies at the heart of Shola Amoo’s The Last Tree. Femi, an 11-year-old British-Niger­ian boy, has a peace­ful life in the idyl­lic Lin­colnshire coun­try­side, where he lives with his white fos­ter moth­er Mary.

He whiles away the hours explor­ing the seem­ing­ly end­less lush fields which sur­round his home, until his birth moth­er returns and he moves into her flat in inner-city Lon­don. Find­ing him­self trans­posed to a grey and noisy hous­ing estate and at odds with a par­ent he doesn’t real­ly know, Femi strug­gles to adapt, as well as make sense of war­ring ele­ments of his identity.

Amoo demon­strates a knack for immers­ing us in Femi’s sens­es, in par­tic­u­lar his use of sound cre­ates the feel­ing of stim­u­la­tion over­load – every breath, every foot­step, even water, trick­ling into a bowl. Jump­ing for­ward five years, new­com­er Sam Adewun­mi cap­tures Femi’s anger but also his lone­li­ness, and a des­per­ate sense of con­fu­sion as he’s caught between the con­flict­ing desires to forge his own path or fit in with his fam­i­ly and friends.

Focussing on black mas­culin­i­ty and the strug­gle to pull away from dark­ness when you’ve spent your whole life fight­ing, Amoo’s film speaks to his per­son­al expe­ri­ence as a British-Niger­ian grap­pling with dias­po­ra, offer­ing a brief insight into Yoru­ba spir­i­tu­al­i­ty towards the end of the film, when Femi goes in search of his absen­tee father.

It’s a shame this is only a small part of the sto­ry, as The Last Tree is at its best when grap­pling with ele­ments which feel fresh, includ­ing the depic­tion of Femi’s com­plex rela­tion­ship with his moth­er. Even so, Amoo’s sec­ond fea­ture and Sam Adewunmi’s con­fi­dent debut per­for­mance firm­ly estab­lish them both as tal­ents to watch.