Coming This Friday to Amazon Video: Small Axe

On Friday, Amazon Video will release Small Axe, an anthology of five films directed and co-written by Steve McQueen. The films focus on the West Indian community in London from the 60s to the 80s.

The NY Times has nice coverage of the series, which, the paper notes, includes: a “fact-based courtroom drama (“Mangrove”), a delicate semi-autobiographical portrait (“Education”) and an intimate dance-party mood piece (“Lovers Rock”).” Dance party mood piece! I’m sold.

The name of the anthology, the NYT writes, comes from: “an African proverb popularized in Jamaica by Bob Marley’s eponymous 1973 song (“If you are the big tree, we are the small ax”), and the British-Guyanese scholar Paul Gilroy — who developed the idea of “Transatlantic Blackness,” a culture that is at once African, American, Caribbean and British[.]”

Check out the trailer:

-KitJ