The Oscar winner’s five-part anthology begins with Mangrove, a long-overdue dramatisation of a landmark trial, featuring luminous portrayals and nuanced representation
Steve McQueen, the west London-raised son of a Trinidadian mother and a Grenadian father, has already secured his place in cinema history. In 2014, he became the first black director of an Academy Award-winning best picture with 12 Years a Slave, a film set in the 19th-century United States. An equivalent epic about black people’s history in Britain had never been made, until now.
McQueen’s five-part anthology series tells four true stories and one imagined, set between the late 60s and mid 80s. The fact that it is airing on television, on the national broadcaster’s flagshipchannel, is significant. Watching Small Axe provides viewers of Caribbean descent with the rare thrill of representation, but these histories are national histories – they are for everyone.
