"From 12 Years a Slave" which in 2014 won him the Oscar for best film for a portrait of the structural racism suffered by blacks in the United Kingdom: while the very white world of "The Crown is streaming on Netflix. ", Amazon Prime and the BBC reply with" Small Ax ", a five-part miniseries by Steve McQueen about historical characters and events of the Afro-British community in London.
It is the first time that McQueen, born in West London of Trinidad and Grenada parents, works on the life of black people in Great Britain: "I had to understand where I came from. But I needed a certain maturity that I didn't have ten, 15 years ago" , the director told the New York Times that for "Mangrove," the first episode of the series, he called Letitia Wright from "Black Panther" as the real Black Panther Altheia Jones-LaCointe.
The five episodes of "Small Ax" - the title is a reference to Bob Marley's song of the same name - span twenty years of our time: "Mangrove", the first released over the weekend, revisits the sensational 1971 trial in which nine black activists , accused of inciting rioting during a protest against police brutality in Notting Hill, managed to get the police convicted.
"I asked McQueen, 'why this story, why today'", said Wright of the first meeting with the director: "She replied: 'The window is closing: we cannot allow our old people to die without seeing represented on the screen themselves, their culture and all the contribution they have given to this country ".
All issues that acquire particular resonance in the light of the violence of the police in the United States that last summer gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement and, across the Atlantic, the Windrush scandal on the rights denied to Caribbean historical migrants for which the Tory government he had to sprinkle his head with ashes.
"Mangrove" and the second episode of the anthology "Lovers Rock" were supposed to debut in May in Cannes: after the cancellation due to Covid, they were screened at the New York Film Festival while "Red White and Blu", the true story by Leroy Logan (John Boyega from "Star Wars"), a young black man who decides to join the police after the violent assault of two racist policemen against his father, was presented at the Rome film festival.
The five is completed by "Education", a semi-autobiographical portrait, and "Alex Wheatle", set among the Jamaicans of Brixton.
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