And so the film opens with Femi (Akinnuoye-Agbaje playing his own father) and Tolu (Genevieve Nnaji) tearfully handing over their infant son Enitan and a wad of banknotes to Ingrid Carpenter ( Kate Beckinsale), a working-class wife from a Gypsy background, living in a terraced house in Tilbury. The term “farming” was the peculiar euphemism given to the practice, prevalent in 1960s and ’70s England, whereby working or studying Nigerian parents would pay white British families to foster their children. The process by which a young boy can be turned inside-out against his own skin is scary scarier still is the sense that deprogramming this mindset, undoing this damage, and holding the guilty to account is the work of at least a lifetime, and it may never be complete.

Unremittingly, bludgeoningly bleak in its portrayal of his own degradation and humiliation, and displaying only a passing interest in his eventual rehabilitation, the film is remarkable for its lack of self-pity, but it makes the experience of “Farming” a merciless one for the audience too. What if the black protagonist of Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” was not a cop infiltrating a racist institution in order to bring it down, but a true believer finding a violent outlet for a psychological Molotov cocktail of internalized racism and pathological self-loathing? This is, roughly speaking, the extraordinary premise of British actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s directorial debut “ Farming,” which is based with queasy authenticity on his own experiences as a teenage member of a 1980s white skinhead gang in Tilbury, Essex.

Th4 farming 2018