The Last Tree: Emily Haworth-Booth

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But when the children crept out beyond the wall and found one another by the little tree, they laughed and played. They tended the tree, and each day it grew taller and prouder. With nothing to look at but a wall, the villagers changed. They forgot their games and songs, and became cold and hard. They became suspicious of one another.

From the author of the phenomenally successful The King Who Banned the Dark comes a new tale about community and our relationship with the environment and nature. Watching The Last Tree for the second time, I thought I detected echoes of Chris Doyle’s shimmering work for Wong Kar-wai in director of photography Stil Williams’s terrifically expressive cinematography. Widescreen, hand-held closeups and the regular use of slow-mo place us inside Femi’s experience, with the super-saturated colours of those early Lincolnshire scenes contrasting with the starker hues of London life and the emotional melee of a late-in-the-day trip to Lagos. Each location has its own distinct personality but everything is filtered through Femi’s changing frame of mind. There are visual nods to the iconic final scene of Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and a sly invocation of Spike Lee’s trademark “gliding walk” dolly shots, but such references feel organic rather than intrusive. Tai Golding’s still and wary performance as the younger Femi keenly conveys a child emotionally dislocated by being surrendered by the only mother he’s known into Yinka’s strict Nigerian care. Mothering and its inevitable failings form one of the film’s central themes, as Yinka’s beatings and perennial despair at his behaviour leave Femi emotionally shut down and resentful of Mary’s perceived betrayal. His sharp first-person perspective shapes the film, a subjective portrait often delivered, in its urban sections, in unsettling low-angled close-ups on its hero, Spike Lee-style. OMG I can't believe this!!! It actually got me teary in the end! I have to admit, initially while glimpsing the thumbnail of the book cover, I honestly thought it were two little birdies on it lmao. It was until I started actually reading that I realized the figures are boys. The art style is easy to warm up to though! This book would be wonderful for generating discussion on the themes of taking care of our environment, working together, community and friendship. It also highlights the power children can have and use when they are given the opportunity to do so.Sound design plays a crucial role, too, with Femi’s fractured worldview dramatised through a richly textured mosaic of noise that slips from closeup voices and amplified ambient creaks to muffled booms giving the impression of being submerged underwater. It’s as if we can hear the blood rushing in Femi’s ears as he wrestles with self-definition, reminding us of Mahershala Ali’s haunting refrain from Moonlight: “At some point, you gotta decide for yourself who you’re gonna be.” They’re happy playing among the trees and sleeping on the mossy ground until winter comes. They cut down branches for firewood. So by the time we find Femi again at 16, now played by a brooding Sam Adewunmi, he’s grown a carapace of hard-man masculinity. Listening secretly to The Cure while telling friends it’s Tupac, he’s learned to hide his soft underbelly.

They took the wall down, planted seeds and tended the saplings. They talked and sang, and as their children grew, a new forest grew with them.As they cut down the trees, the forest becomes thinner, until there is just one last tree standing. A group of friends live happily in the forest until they decide to begin cutting down the trees to build homes and, ultimately, a huge wall. Then, living in the shadow of the wall, their friendship begins to fall apart. Change only happens when their children discover the last living tree and the joy of playing beside it. They decide to take matters into their own hands and ultimately help the adults realise that by protecting their environment they'll look after their community too.

When summer returned, the sun was hot but there weren’t enough trees for shade. The people cut down more branches to make porches. The Last Tree” is an ecological fable for children. The story begins when a group of friends look for a place to live and settle in a forest. A group of families and friends traveled from a hot land to a land that was lush and greend and filled with trees. When winter arrived they chopped trees and built houses. When spring came the winds whipped through and they decided to chop trees to build a wall to protect them from the gusts. As a result there was no play or happy times, only the wall. The families that were friends became distant and unhappy. The children would sneak out beyond the wall and play and watch over the last tree. They gathered its seeds and planted more trees. Slowly the children began to break down the wall. What do you think the families and friends discovered? A digitized ARC of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. When they heard their children playing by the tree and saw how the cool wind twisted gently though the tree’s branches, they remembered how things used to be. Suddenly, they understood what they had done wrong and decided to try to begin again.

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Then they found the forest. It was perfect. The leaves gave shelter from the sun and rain, and a gentle breeze wound through the branches. They need more protection from the weather so they chop down trees to build shelters. When their shelters aren’t warm enough, they chop down more trees to build cabins. Writer-director Amoo’s plot takes on a generic gang-tale feel, however, as Femi is recruited by local gangster Mace (Demmy Ladipo). From early on, we understand that violence, from Yinka’s canings to the ‘punishment beatings’ he metes out on Mace’s behalf, is the price Femi pays for adult attention. Despite this, the film opts to show him dabbling rather than diving into lawlessness – shoplifting, enforcing Mace’s beatings, acting as a bemused lookout during a violent crime – which is a useful reminder that teenage life is mutable. Not every ‘lieutenant’ inevitably opts to stay with the gang. Nonetheless, it gives the plotting an oddly uncommitted air.

The children talked to their parents about the tree and how it made them feel, but their parents wouldn’t listen. To satisfy their parents’ desire for more wood, the children secretly cut down boards from the wall and brought them to their parents. They boarded up their windows and built fences, but when the wind rushed into the village, the people ran outside and saw that in spite of all their new wood, the last tree still stood. When the fall winds came, there were no trees to stop it. The people decided to cut down the rest of the trees and build a wall. They left one scrawny tree standing because they thought it was worthless.Their actions upon finding the little tree got to me. It was phrased so very simple, but I can practically hear the awe in the exclamation. Read this book, cherish trees, folks! 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. A huge leap forward from the experimental collages of 2016’s A Moving Image (which Amoo has accurately called a “feature-length, multimedia, visual-art project”), The Last Tree bristles with film-making confidence, plunging us into the world of its young protagonist as he struggles to find his place in a strangely changing environment. Powerful performances, tactile visuals and an elegantly fluid score add to the impact of this impressively understated yet profoundly moving tale. The last tree is beautifully illustrated and the text flows like a babbling brook carrying you along it’s course, down waterfalls and out to the big wide sea of life.