THE LAST TREE

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Shola Amoo

STARRING Sam Adewunmi, Gbemisola Ikumelo, Denise Black, Tai Golding and Nicholas Pinnock

RUN TIME: 99 mins

an ArtMattan Films release

THE LAST TREE is the semi-autobiographical story of Femi (as a child played by newcomer Tai Golding), a British boy of Nigerian heritage who, after being fostered in rural Lincolnshire, moves to inner-city London to live with his birth mother. In his teens, Femi (Sam Adewunmi) is struggling with the culture and values of his new environment. Femi must decide which path to adulthood he wants to take, and what it means to be a young black man in London during the early 00s.

THE LAST TREE is the second feature film from Shola Amoo, whose work has been showing at The Luminal since we began in 2015.

Here, Amoo shares with us his version for his film:

“As a semi-autobiographical story, THE LAST TREE represents my most personal work to date. I was interrogating my life as I was fostered in similar circumstances and had to navigate my route to personal identity as displayed by Femi's character. I wanted to tell this story because I know so many who went through a similar process and spent the rest of their lives trying to figure it out.

The key aim of the visual and sonic aesthetic of the film was to place the viewer in the perspective of our protagonist, as we grow and develop with him. I wanted to create an immersive experience that allowed the audience to proverbially walk in his footsteps and feel the force of a violent act or a tender moment. Playing with Femi's subjectivity allowed me to push the experimentation, occasionally being able to distort the voices of other characters to unnatural levels and move from realism to the surreal in a seamless fashion.

I enjoy the concept of Location as a character and drew a lot of inspiration from the three distinct spaces and time frames that our narrative is enveloped by. For example, I wanted to communicate what it feels like to be in East Street Market in the hustle and bustle, to communicate the London I experienced growing up. We have a character that is moved from location to location and we see him at different points in his life. Each space comes with its own cultural and political framework for Femi to navigate: he was fostered and raised in a completely different racial environment. The aim was to allow each space to retain its distinct energy but simultaneously find a synergy between all three, while also exploring the transition moving from a rural white space to an urban black one.

A good example of an idea that is consistent throughout each space is fluidity and a kinetic energy in movement, which heightens the immersion. It was important to be able to organically follow Femi’s movements throughout each space, alternating between smooth and rougher renditions of his actions. This represents the other duality within the film, the oscillation between a raw documentary realism and a heightened stylized tone.

THE LAST TREE is a rare example of a British film with a majority black cast, and having the opportunity to make a film like this in the UK is significant. We are still very much in our infancy when it comes to films about the British black experience. This is a story with a 90% black cast, focusing on the British African experience, but it isn’t the only story. There are a lot of stories that still need to be told.”