Damson Idris, Kate Beckinsale, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, John Dagleish, Jaime Winstone
British actor turned writer-director Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje draws on his own extraordinary childhood story for his arresting feature debut about a Nigerian child voluntarily placed in a white working-class British home.
Exploring one of the most shocking social experiments in recent UK history – the ‘farming’ out of Nigerian children to white families between the 1960s and 80s – the film follows a young boy, Enitan (played first by Zeehan Hanson Amissah, then Damson Idris) as he is left in the care of a British family by his Yorùbá parents in hopes it will afford him a better future.
Instead, under the dubious care of his foster mother Ingrid (Kate Beckinsale) and growing up within the frank racism of Enoch Powell-era Britain, Enitan’s teenage years see him join a skinhead gang led by the brutal, charismatic Levi (John Dagleish) as, stranded between two cultures, profoundly conflicted and absent any sense of security, he struggles to avoid complete self-destruction.
Spanning the experiences of its protagonist from childhood into adulthood, full of raw emotion, lurid violence and striking imagery, Farming is an indelibly powerful autobiographical study of one child’s struggle for acceptance, a stable identity and a sense of their own worth within a hostile world.
