‘So, if you are the big tree, we are the small axe…’
Steve McQueen is a British director known for acclaimed feature films 12 Years a Slave and Shame. In 2020, in the midst of the BLM movement and a global pandemic, McQueen released Small Axe – an anthology series consisting of five feature length films documenting the black experience in Britain. Here’s all of them. Ranked…
5. Lovers Rock
This was the first one I watched and also the reason why it took me so long to watch the others. Charting the burgeoning relationship of two lovers at a 1980s reggae party, Lovers Rock is probably a wonderful nostalgia exercise for those that attended such parties, but for everyone else, there isn’t enough here to justify a feature length film. If you’re going to skip a chapter, make it this one.
4. Alex Wheatle
This biopic of prominent Black novelist and journalist Alex Wheatle is more of an origin story than a traditional biopic, but this allows McQueen to seek to understand Wheatle in a more intimate way. Covering his trouble childhood and subsequent incarceration at her majesty’s pleasure, Alex Wheatle still sometimes feels rushed in terms of pacing, especially as this is the shortest entry in the Small Axe series. Despite this, a good performance from Sheyi Cole in the titular role and a solid supporting cast ensures that the fourth entry in this anthology is worth watching.
3. Education
The final Small Axe films concerns education, specifically the informal segregation that black children have suffered (and sadly continue to suffer) throughout the educational system. McQueen’s example feels extreme, but it is sadly predictable that it is based on real events. Some London schools really did follow an unofficial policy of transferring disproportionate numbers of black children from mainstream education to schools for the so-called “educationally subnormal”. A tragic and scandalous moment in time that is captured here through a winning performance from Kingsley Smith.
2. Mangrove
A love letter to an iconic restaurant in the heart of the black community in Notting Hill, Mangrove charts the outrageous civil rights breaches that saw midnight raids and violent protests leading to a landmark court case. McQueen chronicles this with an undercurrent of seething anger and pride at how the ‘Mangrove Nine’ conducted themselves at trial. Mangrove was the first Small Axe entry, and it certainly set the tone for what would come later.
1. Red, White and Blue
Containing a stunning performance from John Boyega as an aspiring police officer (and an entertaining if over-the-top turn from Steve Toussaint as his militant father), Red, White and Blue is a moving, harrowing account of police violence and institutional racism in 1980s London. So good it could have sparked a mini series of its own, McQueen’s third entry in the Small Axe series is also the most affecting and the most cinematic.