Grow Your Own (PG, 97 mins) Stars: Nathalie Armin, Omid Djalili, Philip Jackson, John Henshaw, William Atkinson, Benedict Wong, Olivia Colman, Sarah Hadland Director: Richard Laxton
GROW Your Own is a likeable movie in the Ealing Films style, full of eccentric English types on an allotment coming face to face with asylum seekers
Directed by Richard Laxton and co-written by Liverpool writers Frank Cottrell Boyce and Carl Hunter, it’s a feel-good film in which most of the participants end the movie better than when they began it. And the nasty ones get their comeuppances.
The story revolves around a group of allotment holders who are rather unwelcoming when refugees arrive to tend plots as part of a project.
There is an Indian doctor and his family, an African woman grieving over her dead husband and – most notably – a Chinese man, right, so traumatised by his experiences that he can’t even talk, his two young children doing the talking for him.
Matters come to a head when a phone company arrives to place a telephone mast in the allotment: whose allotment should be sacrificed? Naturally, the refugees draw the short straw.
With a cast of British character actors, the story is well told and very funny. And there are a few surprises.
