The Last Tree review – tender tale of an uprooted childhood

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 dramaWriter-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, 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

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