The Glasgow flat that Ama (Le’Shantey Bonsu) shares with her mother, Grace (Déborah Lukumuena, excellent), is a jewel box of a place, filled with rich colours and the treasured stories they repeat to each other, comforting tales in which the pair wrap themselves each night. It’s a home that Grace, an immigrant attuned to the threats and casual racism of the world outside, would prefer they never had to leave. But Ama forms a friendship with a girl at her primary school and starts to spread her wings – a development that fills Grace with crippling anxiety born out of her own troubled childhood.
Small and slight in scale but sensitively drawn, this thoughtful feature debut from Adura Onashile has a quiet power, much of which is channelled through the wary eyes of the remarkable Lukumuena.
