Grow Your Own

Wow! A genuinely funny and moving film that lingered in my head for days. Probably the most unsexy list of ingredients to make a movie from - gardening, immigration, telephone masts - but it links all these plots with an amazing cast of characters who it is impossible not to care for. It's a bit like Little Miss Sunshine - why should a road movie about a dysfunctional family on their way to a beauty pageant work? - because you care about every single one of them and the same thing happens here. Rather than laying the politics of immigration on with a trowel the writing and directing insinuate it throughout the stories. A great piece of British Indie Cinema - It left me with that feeling you get after an impromptu warm summer evening sitting outside the pub.

I recently saw this movie and thought it was charming and funny. The comedy was subtle in places, laugh-out-loud in others, but always well-placed.

I would disagree with the notion that some of the characters are superfluous or under- developed... I thought they were subtle, well-played and a great collection of people. I didn't find it hard to imagine them digging away somewhere on an allotment!

I do agree with the comment about Benedict Wong, this was a great performance, I also really liked Eddie Marsan and Philip Jackson's characters.

As for the name, I rather like "Grow Your Own" as a title!

I didn't expect a movie about asylum seekers and allotments to be one of my favourite movies. But it's British quirkyness is absolutely charming. Where else in the world do they have allotments? but more importantly, I think it perfectly captures the great British love-hate of foreigners. We like them but hate them at the same time. In this movie we have the typical mistrust yet somehow that's broken down. Partly it's through food - yes we do love our takeaways here in the UK don't we? and partly through skills (yes we are short of a few) and partly through romance.

It's a movie that I think is really topical and all UKIP supporters should see!

While it's not exactly a film that is going to set the world on fire with it's originality, "Grow Your Own" is a perfectly OK drama/comedy. (Note, it is a drama/comedy rather than a comedy/drama. There is a difference.)

The trailer would have you believe that "Grow Your Own" is a film concerned with British eccentrics, stuck in their ways, perturbed by the influence of foreigners on the little piece of England they call the Allotment. Er... Actually that is exactly what it is about (clichés ahoy!), but it is the sometimes very tragic human stories behind the clichés that make "Grow Your Own" interesting enough.

The cast is made up of the same faces that are always turning up in British films. (Philip Jackson, Eddie Marsan, John Henshaw, Olivia Colman, Omid Djalili, et al.) All of them perfectly, and probably obviously, cast.

Not world breaking, but a perfectly amiable film for a quiet afternoon at the cinema. Yes, it is another, I'm assuming, lottery funded British movie of no interest to anybody outside of the British Isles, but give it a go. You might like it.

I deeply suspect that 'tfitoby' is missing the point of what I found to be an extraordinarily sensitive and subtle piece of social comment. The point is HOPE and the vehicle is COLOUR. From the social to the physical, Richard Laxton peppers his film with the symbolism of diversity and change. From the stark, colourless winter emerges the blooming promise of spring, (using mirrored panning shots at either end of the film: Katherine Mansfield's time-honoured narrative tools in celluloid). From inconspicuous attire, evolves the vibrant 'panache' of Hawaiian shirts. The dichotomy of confinement is also explored (a space normally connected with travel, trade and promise presents itself as a physical and mental incarceration, whilst the physically enclosed space of the allotments represents freedom, social and cultural responsibility and diversity - not to mention what the intrusive nature of the communications industry). These are not humorous issues, but I feel that genuine and warming comedy helps to highlight, implicitly and explicitly in this film, the myriad of social problems – and joys - we face today. I suggest very strongly that 'tfitoby' takes another look - perhaps he could watch it on one of the BBC's prime viewing slots, say, on a Sunday evening?