A London actor has won Robert Redford’s backing for a film based on his experiences as black child who became a skinhead during the Seventies heyday of the racist National Front.
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, 44, will be presented with a £10,000 award at the Sundance London film festival tonight after his script, Farming, is read in public to financiers by Minnie Driver, Ashley Walters and David Harewood.
Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s Nigerian parents fostered him with white working-class parents in Tilbury, Essex from the age of six weeks.
The practice was common at the time, he said, among African parents while they built careers.
“They assumed anybody white was right,” he said. “We became the first black children immersed in that skinhead sub-culture. It was traumatic and brutal.”
