This hopeful, heartwarming adaptation of Onjali Raúf’s award-winning novel about a refugee’s first, frightened steps into a British classroom is a reminder that behind the frothing anti-immigrant fervour of our age are traumatised people, many of them children. If political rhetoric has all but dehumanised them, this returns us to our humanity.
Adapted by Nick Ahad, it features the initially silent Ahmet (Farshid Rokey), a Syrian boy only able to speak Kurdish. Some classmates, namely Brendan the Bully (Joe McNamara), reflect the hostility of the greater world outside the school gates but Alexa (Sasha Desouza-Willock) and her gang, Josie (Petra Joan-Athene), Michael (Abdul-Malik Janneh) and Tom (Gordon Millar), first welcome him and then set about trying to find his lost parents. That endeavour takes them intrepidly to Buckingham Palace to canvas the Queen (the book was written before King Charles’s succession and Ahad chooses to keep to the original).
