8 AR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020Television
It took Steve McQueen a long time to make a
film about Black life in Britain.
“I needed to understand myself, where I
came from,” the director said of his new
project, “Small Axe.” “Sometimes, you’ve got
to have a certain maturity, and I wouldn’t
have had that 10, 15 years ago.”
McQueen, who was born in West London
to Grenadian and Trinidadian parents, is one
of Britain’s most gifted and garlanded Black
filmmakers. He’s best known to American
audiences as the director of the star-studded
“Widows” from 2018 and “12 Years a Slave,”
in 2013, for which he became the first Black
director of a best picture Oscar winner.
When he collected that trophy, McQueen
was already developing the drama project
with the BBC that would become “Small
Axe.”
Six years later, McQueen is debuting not
one, but five films about various aspects of
London’s West Indian community, set be-
tween the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, air-
ing in the United States as an anthology se-
ries on Amazon Prime Video, starting Fri-
day.
When “Small Axe” began development,
the project was pitched to the BBC as con-
ventional television, telling one story over
six hours or so. (Amazon signed on as a pro-
ducing partner last year.) “To get my foot in
the door, it started off as a sort of episodic
situation,” McQueen said in a phone inter-
view from Amsterdam, where he’s lived
since 1997. “But then I realized they had to be
individual films because there’s too much in-
teresting material.”
Today, the finished product comprises five
discrete works of varying lengths (the short-
est is 70 minutes; the longest 128 minutes),
all directed and co-written by McQueen.
(Courttia Newland co-wrote two episodes
and Alastair Siddons co-wrote three.)
The installments were shot in a variety of
formats (including 16-millimeter and 35-mil-
limeter film) by the emerging Antiguan cine-
matographer Shabier Kirchner — the first
three premiered at this year’s New York
Film Festival. The films include an epic
scale, fact-based courtroom drama (“Man-
grove”), a delicate semi-autobiographical
portrait (“Education”) and an intimate
dance-party mood piece (“Lovers Rock”),
with myriad tones and textures in between.
The series will air in Britain on BBC One,
which is a matter of significance for Mc-
Queen. “It was important for me that these
films were broadcast on the BBC, because it
has accessibility to everyone in the country,”
he said. “These are national histories.”
“Mangrove,” the series opener, focuses on
the sensational trial of a group of Black activ-
ists in 1971. They were accused of inciting a
riot during a protest against the targeted po-
lice harassment of patrons at the Mangrove,
a Caribbean restaurant in London’s Notting
Hill district that was a thriving hub for Black
intellectuals and artists. (The film offers a
corrective to the whitewashed fantasia of
“Notting Hill,” Richard Curtis’s 1999 roman-
tic comedy.) Not only did the nine — includ-
ing the Trinidadian-British activists Darcus
Howe and Altheia Jones-LeCointe, key
members of the British Black Panther Party
— beat the rioting charge, they forced the
first ever judicial acknowledgment of racism
from the British police.
This installment is particularly resonant
in the light of Britain’s recent Windrush
scandal, which saw hundreds of Common-
wealth citizens detained, deported and de-
nied legal rights as a result of a 2012 govern-
ment policy to create a “hostile envi-
ronment” for immigrants.
The majority of victims of the scandal
were part of the “Windrush generation” of
largely Caribbean people who were invited
by the colonial British government to help
rebuild the economy in the aftermath of
World War II. (The name comes from the
Empire Windrush, a ship that brought an
early group from the Caribbean to Britain in
1948.) After arriving in Britain, many mem-
bers of this cohort faced hostility, discrimina-
tion in employment and housing, and police
harassment. Yet, as “Small Axe” demon-
strates, they found ways to organize and re-
sist.
In the climactic sequence of “Mangrove,”
Darcus Howe (a magnetic Malachi Kirby),
representing himself in court, declares that
the case “has seared the consciousness of
the Black community to an extent that the
history of Britain cannot now be written
without it.” It’s a rousing line that left me feel-
ing rueful: In reality, mainstream histories of
Britain have largely excluded the story of
the Mangrove defendants, as well as the
stories of other pioneering Black figures.
The actress Letitia Wright, who was born
in Guyana and moved to London at 7, said in
a phone interview that she was unaware of
the Mangrove story before researching the
project, for which she was cast by McQueen
and the casting director Gary Davy after one
meeting, and no conventional audition.
“To be honest, I had no clue — it’s not in
the textbooks at school. The stronghold of
Black History Month [October] in the U.K. is
American history,” said Wright, who plays
Altheia Jones-LeCointe, a founder of the
Black Panther Movement in Britain. “You
have mostly — and I honor and respect them
always — Martin Luther King and Malcolm
X on the posters, but you don’t have the Al-
theias.”
The role allows Wright, who rose to block-
buster-level fame as Shuri in “Black Pan-
ther,” to play a real-life Black Panther. Jones-
LeCointe, who was born in Trinidad and
moved to England in 1965 to study for a
Ph.D. in biochemistry, has been described as
“the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met”
by the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.
Caribbean pride underpins “Small Axe”
and McQueen named resistance icons with
West Indian heritage who have informed his
life and work: “Stokely Carmichael, from
Trinidad, coined the phrase ‘Black Power.’
Look at Marcus Garvey. Malcolm X’s mother
was from Grenada. C. L. R. James,” he said.
“This is nothing new, people from the WestIndies and our influence. That’s where we
come from: rebel country.”
The anthology’s title comes from an Afri-
can proverb popularized in Jamaica by Bob
Marley’s eponymous 1973 song (“If you are
the big tree, we are the small ax”), and the
British-Guyanese scholar Paul Gilroy —
who developed the idea of “Trans-Atlantic
Blackness,” a culture that is at once African,
American, Caribbean and British — was se-
ries consultant. For me, a grandson of the
Caribbean whose paternal grandparents
were part of the Windrush generation, the
latticework of respect and representation for
the islands offered by “Small Axe,” on such a
grand scale, at times felt overwhelming.
Equally overwhelming, however, are the
more harrowing aspects of “Small Axe,” es-
pecially in the wake of the killing of George
Floyd in Minnesota and the protests and in-
tensified public conversations around police
brutality and police abolition that followed.
The third film in the series, the early 1980s-
set “Red, White and Blue,” stars John
Boyega as the real-life figure Leroy Logan
who, following the vicious police beating of
his father, abandoned a career in research
science to join the London police force. Lo-
gan believed the force could be reformedfrom within at a time when tensions between
the police and Britain’s Black communities
had never been higher.
It’s arresting — and slightly surreal — to
watch this earnest, arguably naïve character
being portrayed by an actor who made head-
lines in June for delivering a fierce speech in
London’s Hyde Park condemning police bru-
tality. “It’s been crazy,” Boyega said in a
phone interview, adding that people have
asked him if he was cast in “Small Axe” be-
cause of his role in the Black Lives Matter
movement, even though the project
wrapped before the protests.
“People talk about the different types of
racism Black people deal with, and often ex-
pect that the racism in America is quite out-
ward and in-your-face, whereas in the U.K.
there’s subtlety, layers to it,” Boyega said.
“To explore that conversation in a healthy
way is kind of cool.”
When asked about George Floyd and the
protests, McQueen replied wearily. “I’m just
tired,” he said. In Britain “it took a long time
for people to believe the West Indian com-
munity about what was going on. All of a sud-
den we’re being believed. It’s taken a man to
die in the most horrible way. It’s taken a pan-
demic. And it’s taken millions of people
marching in the streets for the broader pub-
lic to think ‘possibly there’s something about
this racism thing.’ ”
“If you don’t laugh, you’d cry,” he added.
“That’s how we deal.”
Near the end of “Mangrove,” Jones-
LeCointe and a fellow defendant, Barbara
Beese (Rochenda Sandall), collapse into ex-
hausted laughter at the absurdity of their
trial. McQueen acknowledged that making
“Small Axe,” too, has been an emotional
roller coaster, one he’s still processing.
“I just cried the other day thinking of my
father,” he said. “My father is not here to see
this — a lot of West Indian men of that gener-
ation lived and died without having that ac-
knowledgment. And it’s heavy still.”
“But we have a future!” he exclaimed,
brightening. “That’s the main thing.” In the
beautiful “Small Axe,” the past is the future,
and that future is now.‘I Needed to Understand Myself ’
Steve McQueen explores being
Black in Britain in a new series.
By ASHLEY CLARKANA CUBA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESSteve McQueen, top, on
the experience of Black
people in Britain: “If you
don’t laugh, you’d cry.”
Histories of Britain have
largely excluded the
stories of pioneering
Black figures like the
defendants, middle right,
seen in this episode of
“Small Axe.” The
anthology also features
Shaniqua Okwok, above
left, and Amarah-Jae St.
Aubyn; and John
Boyega, at right.PARISA TAGHIZEDEH/AMAZON PRIME VIDEODES WILLIE/AMAZON PRIME VIDEOWILL ROBSON-SCOTT/AMAZON PRIME VIDEO‘Small Axe,’ an
anthology, will
run on Amazon
and BBC One.