Back in the 1960s and over many decades, there was a common practice in England where Nigerian families gave their children to white families who fostered them, committed to providing education and sustenance. It was known as “farming.” As part of the agreement, it was expected that the children would go back to their country at some point.

You can empathize immediately about the difficulties that those children faced isolated from their families, and it probably wasn’t as fortunate experience as their parents and foster families pretended it to be. For the rest of the world, this disturbing and to some extent cruel practice is hardly known, which makes the release of a movie like Farming instructive. What makes it an eye-opener is that it’s told from the perspective of someone who experienced the process. In his feature-length directorial debut, actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje has the opportunity to tell his own story.

Enitan (Zephan Amissah) is one of those fostered boys in the care of a British family in Tilbury, England. His adoptive mom, Ingrid (Kate Beckinsale), divides her time with other Nigerian children that are part of her household, while Enitan grows up to become a silent and shy boy. During a brief return to Nigeria, his parents believe he will never adapt to life back home, so it will be better for him to remain in England.

Far from an identification with his original culture and always mistreated as a stranger in the country where he’s raised, Enitan grows up to become a resentful teenager (now played by Damson Idris) full of rage and pain, aware of being misunderstood. He becomes involved in fights, confronts teachers, ignores Ingrid, and never befriends anyone.

His life gets worse when he meets a skinhead gang of white supremacists self-identified as Tilbury Skin. They start to harass him violently, until they force him to get naked and stand against a wall where the leader of the band covers his body with white spray next to graffiti proclaiming “Keep Britain white.” Later Enitan tries to counterattack his bullies with disastrous results. The gang submits him to yet another form of humiliation. Somehow Enitan feels fascinated with this group and goes after them one more time. In the encounter, he is commanded to rape a pig, and it ends with him becoming a member.

The intricacies of this unsubtle story would be easy to dismiss if it weren’t for the fact that the director is as close to the material as anyone can get. Without belittling the personal nature of this narrative, it’s hard to be drawn into a movie largely defined by plenty of shocking scenes and stereotypes. It relies on racism as a provocative topic, with a certain sense of exploitation. Levi (John Dagleish), the leader of Tilbury Skin, is a cartoon, while the rest of the band barely counts as characters. Ingrid and teacher Ms. Dapo (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) are sporadic plot devices that waste the talent of the actresses.

The scenario would have been more convincing if viewers had a real appreciation of Enitan’s motivations or his internal conflicts. You can suspect some of them, but he’s an elusive one-note character the entire time. Between the Enitan from the past and the one in the present that today voices his memory with images, there is an insufficient gap that cannot be solved with the sentimentalism of a happy, out of place, and abrupt last-minute arc of redemption.

Farming recalls instantly another movie from this year called Skin, also about a white supremacist cult member who seeks reformation. Both movies are based on real-life stories, and both failed as complex and solid portrays of social unrest. In the case of Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s film, this may be proof that sometimes the best narrator is not necessarily the actual subject.