Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Writer/director: Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Icon Film Distribution.
Cast: Damson Idris, Kate Beckinsale, John Dagleish, Gugu Mbatha-Raw.
This 2018 British film is written and directed by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and is based on his own childhood. Between the 1960s and 80s, many thousands of Nigerian children were fostered out by their parents in the UK. This is one of the stories of an informal system that became known as ‘Farming’.
The storyline is about a child whose Yorubá parents place an advertisement in the newspaper in a bid to find him a temporary home while they studied. They give him to a white working-class family in London in the 1960s.
The film follows Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s life story closely. His parents were both of a generation that travelled to Britain in search of an education. His father studied law, his mother accountancy. The idea was to attend university and then head home to help their country, which at the time was plagued by civil war.
The film opens with Femi (Akinnuoye-Agbaje playing his own father) and Tolu (Genevieve Nnaji) tearfully handing over their infant son, Enitan, and a bundle of banknotes to Ingrid Carpenter (Beckinsale), a working-class wife from a Gypsy background, living in a terraced house in Tilbury.
As a boy, Enitan (Zephan Amissah) is introverted, though creative, but prefers to play behind the sofa rather than with his siblings. Enitan, as a teenager, (now played with a dark, aching concentration by Idris), remains friendless although he gets attention from teacher Ms. Dapo (Mbatha-Raw). However, he becomes the target of more obvious aggression, in conflict with the ‘Tilbury Skins’, a skinhead gang led by Levi (Dalgleish).
Enitan overcame adversity and eventually went on to earn a law degree from King’s College London and a Masters in Law from the University of London.
Farming is a painful autobiographical directorial debut for Adewale, who was looking for a way to process a young life of self-abasement and hurt. The film was his therapy.
The name Enitan is prophetic: in the Yorubá tribe of Nigeria, it means ‘a child about whose birth there is a story”.
