Small Axe: Steve McQueen’s five magnificent gifts

Not one but five new movies from an acclaimed and award-winning filmmaker is the Christmas present we’ve been waiting for.

A rookie cop is playing a card game at the police station. He draws the ace of spades and his new colleagues start laughing.

He’s not sure how to respond.

“Whoever draws the ace of spades has to go nick the first black b**tard he claps his eyes on,” they tell him.

“Nick him for what,” the confused newbie asks.

“You’ll learn.”

The short exchange in Mangrove is as jaw-dropping as it is mundane, the illustration of blatant racism and yet the total lack of surprise at it. Of course, that’s how you create and maintain a culture of fear, prejudice and inhumanity. We know it to be true because we’ve all seen it – on screen and in real life.

Mangrove is the first of five films in the anthology series Small Axe, streaming on Binge* from Saturday, although it’s hard to classify Small Axe as either a TV show or movie.

Originally conceived by acclaimed filmmaker Steve McQueen as an anthology TV show, he pivoted during production to make five stand-alone films. He directed and co-wrote all five, working with Alastair Siddons and Courttia Newland on the screenplays.

Letitia Wright as real-life Black Panther leader Altheia Jones in Mangrove, part of the Small Axe series directed by Steve McQueen.

The films are connected by theme and spirit, but they are distinct from each other and better than 95 per cent of the movies released into a cinema in a regular year.

Set in London between the 1960s and the 1980s, all five stories – some of them fictional, some of them based on historical events and people – tell the experiences of the West Indian community as black Britons, facing a torrent of racism, overt and systemic.

While there are no overlapping characters, it is a tapestry of life and culture – defiant, vibrant and proud, even in all the pain and injustice.

The first film, Mangrove, is a punch in the guts, based on the experiences of the Mangrove Nine, a group of activists arrested for protesting against police violence and racism.

It’s a taut two-hour film, centred on the famed Mangrove restaurant, which in the late-1960s and 1970s was a meeting place for the black community in Notting Hill. It was a place of comfort with familiar tastes.

It was also the frequent target of police raids, harassment and violence, the cruel and destructive treatment doled out purely because the community was black. As portrayed in that scene above, they didn’t need to have done anything wrong, they only needed to be black.

It’s a frequently upsetting and infuriating film, which one suspects is McQueen’s intention.

Small Axe is available to stream on Binge from Saturday

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Without confronting such ills, nothing changes. And unless you reckon with the past, there is no reconciling the pervasive injustice that continues today.

As Shaun Parkes’ Frank Crichlow says, “The system is as crooked as a damn ram’s horn.”

McQueen is a prodigious filmmaker who understands the power of cinema as a persuasive and revelatory storytelling medium.

And in a film like Mangrove, that varies from the small moments he stews on, like a sideways colander and dented tin of peas on the ground, the detritus of a police raid, or the crimson blood on a black man’s face, the victim of police brutality.

Just like in his previous work including 12 Years A Slave and Hunger, McQueen’s balance of the grand with the seemingly banal is what makes him so effective. He finds the significance in all those moments.

And that is also true of the remaining four of Small Axe’s collection. A movie set in a 1980s house party, Lovers Rock is an ode to a particular style of reggae music.

It’s almost a palette cleanser after the heavier themes of Mangrove but of course, for all of its focus on music, mood and romance, Lovers Rock is connected to Small Axe’s overall raison d’etre – and just like in real life, not everything is pain and suffering, it’s also about those moments of joy and losing yourself in something disembodied.

John Boyega is the lead in the Red, White and Blue instalment

A third film, Red, White and Blue, starring John Boyega, delves again into the fractious relationship between policing and London’s black community with Boyega as a young man who joins the force with the belief that change can come from within. It’s a clash of idealism and reality.

A coming-of-age story, Alex Wheatle, and an exploration of the education system’s entrenched biases, Education, rounds out Small Axe.

For a filmmaker working at the level of McQueen, we’d be lucky to get one new work from him every few years, so the gift of five thoughtful, incisive and potent films in one go is magnificent gift.

Small Axe starts streaming on Binge from Saturday, December 19

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*Binge is majority owned by News Corp, publisher of news.com.au