Steve McQueen Brings the Vibrancy of British Caribbean Communities to the Big Screen

From Mangrove (2020), dir. Steve McQueen (Image courtesy New York Film Festival; photo by Des Willie / Amazon Prime Video).

Academy Award-winning director, Steve McQueen, spotlights stories from his community with a new television anthology Small Axe, which recently premiered at the 2020 New York Film Festival. The series, now slated to be streamed on Amazon Prime, is the focus of Jamaican-American writer, Jourdain Searles', essay for Hyperallergic. Here, Searles covers the upcoming series which charts the lives of Caribbean immigrants in the UK--each story drawing inspiration from real-life events.

“Such tenderness from McQueen yields an odd viewing experience until you learn that each film is based on real-life stories, told to him by his parents during his youth.”