New Showtime series ‘Guerrilla’ explores the 1970s movement
Bigotry looks the same around the world.
“At the most fundamental level, there is no difference,” said filmmaker John Ridley, when asked about prejudices across the globe. “When people are being marginalized or disenfranchised, it really doesn’t matter if it’s about race, religion, creed, or color.”
The Oscar winner is behind Showtime’s powerful new dramatic series “Guerrilla,” debuting Sunday. It’s set in 1971 Britain, a country that was facing its own Black Power movement at the time, though it’s less well-known than the one that was happening in the United States.
Ridley, who wrote the screenplay for “12 Years a Slave,” says he was fascinated with the era because the Black Liberation Army and Black Panther Party were making headlines when he was growing up.
“When you are a kid, there are certain elements of iconography that are very attractive,” he says. “But as you get older, you also start to understand things about consequences and the cascade effect.”
The filmmaker is also behind ABC’s “American Crime” and will examine the Los Angeles riots of 1992 in the documentary “Let It Fall: Los Angeles 19821992,” opening April 21 in theaters and airing April 28 on ABC.
While “Guerrilla” is a fictional story of the black movement in Britain’s ‘70s, it has some true-life inspirations. Ridley had been working on his film “Jimi By My Side” about rock icon Jimi Hendrix around the time of the publication of the book “Renegade: The Life and Times of Darcus Howe.” Howe, who died on April 2, was of one of the leading figures in the British black movement and a consultant on “Guerrilla.”
The book unearthed the existence of a counterintelligence unit within Scotland Yard’s Special Branch that was dedicated to suppressing black activism.
While this was appalling, Ridley was more interested in looking at the story from all sides. Instead of being about the oppressed versus the oppressors, “Guerrilla” tells a nuanced and uneasy story about people who too often were doing wrong with the intentions of doing right.
“It’s just not simple in any regard,” the filmmaker says. “One thing that we really wanted to get into is that these law enforcement officials were not just nameless, faceless individuals. There was a complexity to who they were and the fact that they were put into place to preserve a prevailing perspective from the ruling class.”
The series focuses on Marcus (Babou Ceesay) and Jas (Freida Pinto), a quiet couple working on leftist causes. She’s a nurse with a fiery side, and he teaches convicts for free, unable to get a paying job despite his education. Idris Elba plays Kent, Jas’ ex-boyfriend, a respected nonviolent leader in the black community.
After violence breaks out during a protest, a friend of Marcus and Jas, who had been targeted by the police, is killed. The murder spurs the couple to act, breaking the black militant Dhari (Nathaniel MartelloWhite) out of prison. Afterward, the implications of their actions begin to spiral out of control.
Dhari wants to ramp up the fight, and soon they are enmeshed in a world of 1970s radical splinter groups, with whom they have little in common. Meanwhile, police Chief Inspector Pence (Rory Kinnear), whose motives are murky, pursues the trio. He’s a Rhodesian used to brutally clamping down on blacks.
It’s Marcus, however, who is the most unsure of his actions.
“In the first two episodes, it does feel as if he’s