Steve McQueen, that untold racism

 "I have never been an advocate of violence against racism, but if anything has changed today it depends on the pandemic, on Covid. The Floyd case has been seen on TV by millions of people several times and there has been an awakening to them. things on the part of those who were closed at home to deal with their frailties ". So today at the Rome Film Festival the English Oscar-winning director with 12 years a slave, Steve McQueen, who presented RED WHITE AND BLUE, one of the five episodes of SMALL AX, an anthological TV series (will go to Amazon) set in the Caribbean community of London between the sixties and eighties. A series, among other things, dedicated to George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. In SMALL AX (with Label festival Cannes) racism takes center stage, the subtle and immortalized one full of nuances, but without too much rhetoric, as McQueen does very well in RED WHITE AND BLUE. In this episode the true story of Leroy Logan, a black graduate who, in the sixties, decides at a certain point in his life, despite his father's opposition, to join the police. For him an underwork, but his idea was to be a bridge between the police and that culture of blacks that he knows well, but in reality Logan will soon become the victim of a double racism: that of the police who see him with hatred and that of blacks who consider him a traitor. "It's an idea that started a long time ago, exactly eleven years ago - said the director who had had a dazzling debut with Hunger -. The goal was to bring to the big screen untold stories of the black Caribbean community in London. I worked with the producers and with a researcher to reconstruct many of these events that often involve people who are now dead. In the case of Logan, who collaborated with us, he was really someone who wanted to integrate the black community and the police. " On the new 'inclusive' rules of the Academy, Steve McQueen who has a past as a visual artist commented: "A lot has happened in Hollywood after the release of 12 YEARS A SLAVE which was a film that had an extraordinary success. audience with a black protagonist. In Hollywood they thought perhaps that this was another way to make money. Hence also the rules of the Academy, something that could concern more the technical cast, the workers who could be so facilitated to work in an exclusive industry like that of the cinema ". The story of the title of the series, SMALL AXE (the same as a Bob Marley song), evokes a Jamaican proverb about the strength of dissent: "if you are the big tree, we are the little ax" is beautiful.