The Art of Story:
Small Axe
“Cinema can advance the conversation,” Steve McQueen says of the impetus that drew him to crafting Small Axe, his series of five films about the West Indian community in the United Kingdom. “This is not a history lesson. This isn’t times, dates and places. This is where we’re at now.”
In Small Axe, McQueen relates stories of triumph and struggle that afflicted West Indian communities in Britain in the not-too-distant past. It began, he says, from a want and need to examine a time in history that hadn’t been given the recognition it deserved. “It was about the West Indian community in the United Kingdom that had such an amazing influence through politics and popular culture, and the wider society.”
Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, himself from the West Indies, says the stories he found in McQueen’s scripts were revelations to him. “A lot of West Indian people don’t know these stories,” he explains. “I put a lot of pressure on myself. I’m carrying this flag.”
The variety of stories told by the series include the history of a popular restaurant’s struggle with racist police in Mangrove; the soul and energy of London’s blues house parties in Lovers Rock; a school system that disadvantaged Black children in Education; a young man’s journey away from crime in Alex Wheatle; and the life of one of Britain’s first Black policemen in Red, White and Blue. But within the tapestry of the series, many more aspects of life and culture are explored.
A look at the tales of triumph and struggle told in Steve McQueen’s ground-breaking Small Axe.
Cinema can advance the conversation. This is not a history lesson.
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~ Steve McQueen
“Steve has a direct conversation with the camera. He could see what I couldn’t see.”
“There are so many messages in there,” says John Boyega, who stars as police officer Leroy Logan in Red, White and Blue. “Anybody that’s been through any kind of circumstance or issues will be able to relate to this, and it’s done in such a way that makes us learn, makes us laugh, makes us feel in love and young. It is the human experience, and I think that’s what Steve is trying to give us; an insight on life.”
The series spotlights many aspects of the Black experience, and for Letitia Wright, who plays Altheia Jones-LeCointe in Mangrove, that’s a powerful thing. “That’s my culture,” she says. “Seeing that represented on TV is literally like being in my auntie’s house, but the difference is now you’re being included, you’re being educated and introduced to my culture.”
“It’s a great way of expanding knowledge about the people and connecting the present-day issues to these creative movies,” adds Boyega.
For McQueen, it’s very much about relating the past to the present. “I do see these films as science fiction pictures in a way, because even though they’re about the past, what they’re saying is where we are now with how far we’ve come, but [also] where we need to go.”
