Small Axe

Steve McQueen spent more than a decade developing Small Axe and then delivered it all at once in the autumn of 2020: five films, each standing on its own, made for the BBC and Amazon and shown weekly. Two were selected for the Cannes line-up that year, the festival that never physically happened; Lovers Rock opened the New York Film Festival and was voted the best film of the year in Sight & Sound's international critics' poll, with Mangrove at thirteen.

The subject is West Indian London from the late sixties to the mid-eighties, and the register changes completely from film to film. Mangrove is a courtroom picture built around the Notting Hill restaurant and the trial that followed a 1970 protest, with Shaun Parkes and Letitia Wright. Lovers Rock is a house party in Ladbroke Grove, essentially plotless, carried by music. Red, White and Blue gives John Boyega a police recruit; Alex Wheatle and Education are shorter and rawer. Shabier Kirchner shot all five.

It arrived in a year when British broadcasters were making declarations about representation, and it made most of them look thin, because McQueen had done the archival work and cast from the communities involved. Critics argued about whether it was television or five films. The argument was the point: nothing in British television had been made this way before, and the anthology has since become the standard reference for how to do it.