The Last Tree (2019)
Directed by Shola Amoo
Femi is a British boy of Nigerian heritage who, after being fostered in rural Lincolnshire, moves to inner-city London to live with his birth mother. Struggling with the unfamiliar culture and values of his new environment, teenage Femi has to figure out which path to adulthood he wants to take.
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What critics compared The Last Tree to
Given its structure, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight would be the obvious reference point, but there is little else about Amoo’s sophomore effort that compares.
“The Last Tree” (a title that remains opaque throughout) may not cover as extensive or as intricate a timeframe as Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight,” but it echoes that film’s understanding of disenfranchised masculinity in glitchy progress.
Amoo’s film brings to mind Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight in terms of its introspective sensitivity, toying with operatic aesthetics to explore the conflicted mind of its protagonist.
His transition into a muscly, misguided youth, his war with YInka, and his involvement with an older criminal link The Last Tree to Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight .
Writer-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.
Echoes of Barry Jenkins’s Oscar-winning Moonlight abound in this dreamy and nuanced coming-of-age tale from the writer-director Shola Amoo (A Moving Image).