The judiciary, the police (especially the police) and the education system are in the line of fire for Steve McQueen's anthology Small Ax, although exposing racism is not always the main theme.
The film Lovers rock is simply about a party night in a villa - with all the joy and all the drama that a regular party entails.
Long scenes with dance and nightly salon-drunk sing-a-long, by the way, give severe phantom pain after all kinds of party right now.
When injustices
are to be
described on film and television, it is often tempting to let the victim get a grand revenge, equip it with sharp oneliners and comebacks or fire up with magnificent, mood-enhancing music.
Although there are some revenge elements, Steve McQueen shows that he does not need any narrative knick-knacks.
Instead, he uses imagery where the camera stays on the faces for a long time, he focuses on nervous nail scraping in benches and feet that move under the table - far more efficient (and nice) than a sneaky string orchestra to spice up the emotions.
As an old video artist, McQueen almost always finds interesting or challenging picture angles that make every story he gives himself feel unique and completely new.
Small Ax is a film anthology
rather than a TV series.
Each of the five films: Mangrove, Lovers rock, Red white and blue, Alex Wheatle and Education are independent of each other and good in their own right, but the whole is bigger than the parts: An ambitious portrayal of the so-called Windrush generation - people from the former British colonies in the Caribbean who came to Britain as labor between the late 1940s and 1970s to rebuild society after the war.
It becomes a web of exclusion, community and falling between two different identities.
Although the films
are about different things - a trial drama, a party, a man who wants to be a police officer, a biopic of the author Alex Wheatle and an unfair school system - they have in common that they unsentimentally and directly show the systematic racism that affected the Windrush generation ( named after the first ship that transported people from the Caribbean to the British Isles).
Steve McQueen has made himself known for creating nail-biting suspense in long, slowly told scenes.
In his debut feature film Hunger, which is a little over an hour and a half, almost a third of the film consists of a single scene.
That kind of storytelling is really the only thing I miss - there really would have been room for that in the over six hours that Small Ax makes up.
My second objection is that this mainly became a work for the small screen.
Small ax deserves a cinema screen.
Small ax is shown on SVT play.