User reviews

In 1981, Great Britain suffered a series of racially-charged rioting (most famously in London's Brixton district), triggered by popular anger at aggressive policing and underlying social deprivation. In this series of three films, Steve McQueen sets these in the context of a fire in New Cross that had occured the year before, in which several young black people had died, and which the community believed had been started by a racist attack. McQueen's interviewees capture the sense in which black Britons felt that the state saw them as its enemy; newspaper headlines and television reports show clearly the endemic racism in society at that time. It's the third film, linking the fire to the subsequent riots, which really pays off for me: you get an understanding of how a riot, destructive and awful as it may be, could have felt like liberation to its participants. Today, Brixton is gentrified, and our society feels relatively calm and racially integrated; but there are still huge imbalances of wealth and power. We are by no means immune from another reckoning.

Over the course of the year after the release of Steve McQueen's remarkable film series "Small Axe" there were a few exploratory documentaries commissioned by the BBC to cover different elements of what the dramas depicted. One about the Mangrove Nine and protest, one about education and this - which seems to cover the rest of the films - is the most sprawling and absorbing by some way. Deftly building around and branching out from the brutal New Cross house fire and featuring a huge array of relevant and moving voices. It's an incredibly dense piece of documentary work, a fantastic companion piece to Small Axe and really gives a vibrant and affecting sense of place and time. As I said in my review of the original series - the past is the key to understanding the present, and a vital weapon in the arsenal of fighting for a better future. This is British history.

Steve McQueen has proven himself a master of the historical drama, with protagonists thrown into an unjust world and compelled to fight it at great cost. He never loses sight of the core emotional story as events unravel. Our empathy for those we might ordinarily ignore or find to be our opposites, challenge us to think carefully. How would we ourselves deal with ordeals that could be straight out of the old testament? How to deal with injustice in a world in which the institutions of justice do not serve you?

Switching from fiction to documentary I feared a parade of "talking heads" and sappy music to keep it all together. Thankfully this is no ordinary documentary. McQueen tells this complex story with great understanding of its long reaching consequences without losing sight of the humanity of these people thrown into a series of awful events. By the end the emotional punches leave you shaken but also questioning your own agency/apathy in a world where much remains unjust.