Anthology of racism, resistance
Director Steve McQueen says films are ‘stories that have made my life possible’
NEWYORK— In a movie year mostly lacking big, ambitious releases, Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” anthology is an unqualified main event.
While many other filmmakers are on hold, the “12 Years a Slave” director has raced to finish not one but five new films. Themovies, spanning 1968 to 1985, are each individual stories about the West Indian community in London.
They are testimonies of resistance. Each tale resurrects a chapter of recent history to illuminate the daily oppression of institutional racism and the struggles against it— in courtrooms, in all-white police precincts, in segregated schools.
“These are stories that have mademy life possible as an artist, as a British Black man,” McQueen, who was born in West London to Grenadian parents, said in an interview from London. “You look back to look forward, and also to judge how far we’ve come.”
The scope of McQueen’s achievement has been gradually coming into focus during the New York Film Festival. By Saturday, three of the films will have bowed (two had been set to premiere at the canceled Cannes Film Festival). All will play on the BBC and Amazon in November.
For the filmmaker of “Hunger,” “Shame” and “Widows,” “Small Axe” is a shattering masterwork— a compendium, both damning and celebratory, of Black resilience.
The format— isolated films that are most powerful as a collective— is itself symbolic. The title comes from a West African proverb popularized by Bob Marley: “If you are a big tree, we are a small axe.”
“It’s a story aboutwhy we are here,” McQueen said. “It’s not just about the past, but the present. People’s sacrifices, people’s determination— that’s why these films are important.
“They reshaped the landscape of the United Kingdom. They paved the foundation for multicultural London society.”
The films will run in a different order in November, but McQueen began by premiering “Lovers Rock” at the festival’s openingnight gala. The only fictional tale of the bunch, it brings to vivid, pulsating life a blues party from1980, when young London Black people found refuge, and love, at house parties.
Themovie— joyous and sensual— is wall-to-wall reggae bliss. Still, in this, the brightest of the five acts, there are reminders of the cruelties lurking outside.
“It’s festering, it’s moldering,” McQueen said. “Even with ‘Lovers Rock,’ there are sharks and alligators circling constantly.
“At the blues party, you come out the door and what’s greeting you? Some thugs. You go towork and what’s greeting you? A racist boss. Within that narrative, you have to find your own joy, your own celebration.”
Police brutality is more at the forefront in “Mangrove” and “Red, White and Blue.” The title of “Mangrove” refers to a Notting Hill Caribbean restaurant run by Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes). A proudly Caribbean community gathering place, police regularly harass its customers, spurring protests (Letitia Wright plays British Black Panther leader Altheia Jones-LeCointe) and leading to a historic trial.
“Red, White and Blue,” which is to premiere Saturday, is about Leroy Logan (John Boyega, in his most arresting performance yet), an aspiring research scientist who, after his father (Steve Toussaint) is beaten by police, elects to join the force to attempt to create change fromthe inside.
“Someone’s got to be the bridge,” he says. Yet his colleagues mostly just heap racist abuse on him.
Both films have moments of battles won and the ominous sense of a longer war. They also have beautiful, full-hearted scenes of family, music and love.
“Iwould describe it in someways as surviving the stench— that’s what it is,” said McQueen. “You have to transcend that environment. And often, as Black people, we do.
“You’re limited, so you invent things. You invent break dancing, you invent jazz. Inventing things from nothing, that’s how you survive.”
McQueen has also been calling out inequities in the film industry.
Earlier this summer, he penned an op-ed for the Guardian about the “blatant racism” of the British film industry. The U.K., he said, is far behind Hollywood in representation. Casting “Small Axe,” he has said, was easy because of all the untapped talent just in need of an opportunity.
“I don’t necessarily think Hollywood is that much better at all, but it’s way better than what’s happening in the U.K. for sure, no doubt,” said McQueen. “What I’m interested in is that the industry is welcoming to black talent.
“For a long time, I don’t think it was welcoming and that’s why people didn’t take it up as a career option. They didn’t think itwas for them.”
Theweek-by-week rollout of “Small Axe” through virtual and drive-in festival screenings has only heightened the anticipation of what McQueen has coming next. The final two films are “Alex Wheatle,” which leads up to the 1981 Brixton Uprising, and “Education,” which deals with a 12-yearold boy unfairly classified as “special needs” and the West Indian women who created school programs to fight back.
The anthology is, in a way, mapped against the first half of McQueen’s life. Hewas born in 1969, about the beginning of the films, and McQueen has said he too was assumed less capable as a student than he was.
But if anyone expecting a neat arc to “Small Axe,” McQueen says that’s not its shape.
“There’s no beginning and end— it’s a circle more than anything,” he said. “It’s evidence, questions— and that’s it, really.”