Film - The Last Tree
We meet Femi while he is living with his Nanny, a foster mother in an idyllic rural village. He has three close friends and they go to school then play out in the fields together. His birth mother is coming to visit and he is worried that she’d want him back. She does.
We don’t know why she had to put him into temporary care but sure enough, at 11 years old he is transported from the safe countryside to the capital's rough inner city. On entry, he is told to watch where he treads in the urine splattered lifts in the block of flats he is to now call home.
You wouldn’t expect the soundtrack to for this film to be The Cure but they keep popping up while Femi pretends he’s listening to the more acceptable Tupac when his friends ask. As a teenager, he doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere and gets drawn into running errands for the local drugs gang who offer him a mobile phone. At the same time, he’s getting drawn to a like-minded girl at his school who his ‘friend’ takes every opportunity to bully.
Something has to change and even though his mother makes him do many of the household chores and beats him, deep down, she knows his potential, just doesn’t know how to help him. Given this treatment, he assumes his father left her and I’m assuming this was not the opposite. At the same time a teacher is looking out for him too and he needs all the help he can get as he walks into the fire with the local mob.
Given the subject matter of gangs, bullying, drugs and abuse it is a gentle film. I adored the relationships most of all, especially how he transformed from the innocent with great school friends and a loving foster mum to how he protected himself from the gangsters and his mum. This is a staggering, soul-stirring watch.
I hadn’t clocked he was bought up in Lincolnshire as it could have been any part of rural England. A nice touch is a trip to Lagos which helped give Femi and us some of the answers to why his life had started on a bumpy ride.
I’d already decided to see this film, then got an email saying if you liked Moonlight, you’d like this. They were correct.
8½/10