Shola Amoo’s second feature film is a semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age drama which explores themes of dual identity and finding a place to belong. The Last Tree, which stars Sam Adewunmi as Femi, a British-Nigerian teenager struggling to adjust to a new life in inner London with his mother, after an idyllic childhood spent in rural Lincolnshire. With this move, he is forced to reckon with how his race shapes his cultural experience, and how this will mould his identity. Receiving its UK premiere at Sundance Festival, we had a chance to catch up with Amoo and Adewunmi to chat about the film.
Could you describe the origins of this film, it being semi-autobiographical?
Shola Amoo: So yes, it is semi-autobiographical, and it’s a film that took a long while to get out. I think that’s the way of stories that are coming from a particularly intimate place, and so the collaborators that helped me make the film, my DP [director of photography], my editor, my composer, these are people I had worked with before and we had a variety of other projects, like A Moving Image and the short film Dear Mr Shakespeare, to really hone our craft and how we wanted to work on this film. So I think this film has an interesting aesthetic that’s been honed on other projects with a team that’s worked together for a while. With these people, this is our third collaboration.
The film deals a lot with the duality of nationality and identity. Do you think that’s especially pertinent right now?
Shola Amoo: Absolutely, I think we all know that the UK is going through some sort of identity crisis [laughs]. So I feel like this was not only a good time to deal with personal questions of identity, but also external, national questions of identity.
This film first screened in Utah, do you expect you’ll get a different reaction here in the UK than you did in the US?
Shola Amoo: We had six screenings in Utah and it was really euphoric, but I just feel like the added context of it now showing in the city that it was born in will amplify things one way or another, so I’m very excited.
What was it about this project that really drew you in and made you want to be involved?
Sam Adewunmi: I think it was the themes of the story, and also the authenticity of the script that Shola had written. I could just connect to it in so many ways and the story, as much as it is semi-autobiographical for Shola, felt kind of close to me as well in many, many ways. And I just felt like, I’d never really had that sort of feeling towards a piece of work before, and the character of Femi was complicated, you know, he wasn’t just this boy that was bad, he was a boy that had experienced enough… You see it in the film, for us to understand why he made some of the choices that he made, and I could relate to those choices, and I could understand them.
From your personal experience?
Sam Adewunmi: I mean, from my personal experience, but I grew up in an inner-city London estate as well, and I know many people that are like Femi, or similar to Femi. And that’s not to take away from how unique the character is as well, but I just felt like as an inner-city London, black boy myself, I could just connect to what he was going through.
The Last Tree will be released in UK cinemas on September 20th