The Last Tree review, Culture Whisper
‘She’s not coming to take you away,’ the fostered Femi is told at the start of The Last Tree, as his birth mother comes to visit.
In Shola Amoo's hypnotic coming-of-age drama, the 11-year-old Femi (played by an energetic Tai Golding) lives a happy and idyllic life in the orange-tinted fields of rural Lincolnshire. He plays with his friends, mucks around in dirt, and screams at beautifully isolated landscapes.
But those perfect moments in Femi’s rustic heaven are torn to shreds, to be replaced with the concrete hell of a south London estate. Femi’s birth mother, Yinka, does take him away and those endless Elysian fields turn into the ugly tower blocks of south London, populated with urine-stained lifts and gangs of drug-dealers.
