Although made for TV, the BBC and Amazon co-production Small Axe is treated as a series of individual films. They are each set between 1968 and 1982 with distinct if similar themes of racial injustice and, just as importantly, are a celebration of West Indian family and culture in London.

For writer and director Steve McQueen, who before making Widows and 12 Years a Slave was a Turner Prize winning visual artist, it was important to find collaborators who would bring a similar sensibility to all five films. In Shabier Kirchner he found a young DP from the Caribbean who had made indie feature Skate Kitchen and art installations.

To edit he turned to Chris Dickens, ACE who won an Oscar® and ACE Eddie for Slumdog Millionaire. His work also includes Les Misérables (for which he was also nominated for an ACE Eddie) Berberian Sound Studio, Hot Fuzz and Rocketman. “When I read the script for Mangrove I realized that Steve’s agenda was more on the artistic side than a straightforward TV drama,” Dickens says. “What also attracted me was the era. I don’t remember the late sixties but I do remember vividly growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s and the reggae culture. It was that and his unique approach as a filmmaker that convinced me.”

Mangrove, the feature-length retelling of the 1971 trial of the so-called Mangrove Nine for inciting a riot, was already shot when Dickens joined. “Steve doesn’t cover a scene in a conventional way,” Dickens learned. “First and foremost he’s looking for a shot or an image that represents the scene or the story – one you can use that creates a feeling or an atmosphere. He directs the film in a very pure sort of way.

For example, in Mangrove he decided he didn’t want to see the judge in a particular scene so he didn’t shoot it. It’s not that there was no coverage to edit, just that he is looking for something different. My instinct is to cut the shots a bit shorter at least in the first edit but he taught me to hold shots much longer than you normally would.”

Mangrove was shot on 35mm over seven weeks. The rest of the movies were shot on different media, and took between two and four weeks each, with filming interspersed with breaks for rest and prep. In early drafts, Mangrove was to be told over two episodes but as Dickens began assembly the decision was made to create a single episode.

“The first half of the film is stylistically looser with more handheld camera and faster cutting to express the events leading up to the trial and to compress time (the events take place over a year). There was more coverage to convey situations that are more argumentative and confrontational. That sets up the tension in the second half where the brakes are put on.

“The second half of Mangrove is a very formalized courtroom drama with very little camera movement to underline this very controlled world of the court. Steve’s shot selection on set introduces a tension that you cannot get any other way. He said to me, ‘It’s all about the ritual. The judges and lawyers represent the state. That is what I am trying to bring out.’” Mangrove’s script uses verbatim transcripts from the actual trial. By focusing on the owner of the Mangrove restaurant Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes), McQueen has delivered a classic underdog story.

“Steve said, ‘Frank just wants to open a café,’ and that resonated with me. It brings home the power of the story. Frank’s not a politician. He is pulled into this immense battle with the state. He didn’t want to represent the race struggle, he just wanted to run a restaurant – but he is trapped. The character has no choice.”

While Mangrove was the most structured of the five films, Lovers Rock, which they made next, was the “antidote.” Lovers Rock recreates the atmosphere of being at an all-night house party. The sensuality of the camerawork, as if a dancing participant among the partygoers, has been widely praised and named by BFI-published Sight & Sound as the best film of 2020.

“This was an experiment in making a real-time party and I was just trying to do it justice by bringing out the atmosphere. I loved it from the beginning. There’s a key scene for me where the guys are setting up the sound system which was shot so fluidly in a handful of takes, I just followed it doc style and it worked. At this point the DJs start the music and in the film soundtrack; the music never ends. The key conversation with Steve was to understand that Lovers Rock is a musical, just a different type of musical.”

Rather than concentrating on the micro detail of a scene, Dickens said his focus was on how the whole piece was working, how one piece of music flowed into another. “The classic reggae sound system only had one deck and although the DJs were skillful at changing records they also used sound effects, like police sirens, to mask the transitions. That was a gift to me. I could use those effects as transition from one song to another.

It was the rhythm of those transitions, the choices of music and the shape of the whole that I concentrated on.” Lovers Rock’s 40-page script needed elongating but Kirchner’s camera gave Dickens lots of material to play with. “There’s a moment when the characters have a sing-a-long in the room.

I’m not sure if it was scripted or improvised but they kept the cameras rolling. I felt I wanted to cut it down quite a lot to give it more structure but Steve felt it wasn’t long enough. I ended up using pretty much every take extending the scene to eight minutes and he was right. We’ve all experienced parties like this where you’re in the moment. By playing it longer than normal you do get more of an immersive feeling of being there.”

Red, White and Blue is the true story of how black police officer Leroy Logan tried to change the institutional racism of the Met by joining the force. It is shot in an unfussy style that focuses on John Boyega’s (Golden Globe®-winning) performance. “The issue here was that we weren’t telling the complete story and in some ways I wish we’d told more. For instance, the police tried to frame Leroy but that happened after the events we depict in this story. To heighten the drama, we didn’t use a lot of score.

We had a lot of discussion about that but Steve was adamant that he didn’t want any music apart from what was organic to the scene (on the radio or record player).” Dickens says, “Steve wrote it to be unresolved and for the piece to feel quite stark. There were no quick fixes to institutional racism. Leroy didn’t change things overnight. This is a slow turning wheel not a revolution.”

Also unresolved on screen is Alex Wheatle, a biopic of the early life of the titular civil rights activist and author, which was filmed digitally with a Sony Venice camera. “Even though it is hard hitting right from the start, watching Sheyi Cole’s performance, it was immediately comedic. It’s also like a classic Dickensian tale of downtrodden orphan getting taken in by different groups, beaten up, going to jail but all the while retaining humor.”

Wheatle gets caught up in the 1981 Brixton Riots, which were ignited by the New Cross Fire, an inferno in which 13 young people died that protesters believed to be racially-motivated. “I remember the Brixton Riots. At the time it seemed as if the fabric of the country was disintegrating. There’s a scene in the film where the characters talk about New Cross as an event that precipitated the Brixton riots but I felt we needed to understand more of the context. Steve agreed but because we didn’t have the budget to stage either event we used archive news stills and footage to give more weight to Alex’s actions.

“Also, we felt that we needed to show more friction between the police and Alex and his friends. You needed to see what it was  like on the street. Steve described something that had happened to a friend of his, which was being bundled into the back of a police van and there being blood on the police van. That was real. It was powerful and they went and shot that.”

Education is McQueen’s most personal film of the anthology. It’s about the victimization of a teenage boy by the state which excluded slow learners from the school system. It was shot on 16mm to suggest BBC drama of the period like those about working class characters directed by Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. “Alan Clarke’s [directorial] style was one of the influences Steve and I talked about,” says Dickens. “The arc of this story is straightforward but it lacked an ending. The ending is one of hope, as our young character has learned to read, but we needed something visual to tie it together.”

The film’s motif is space, revealing the character’s interest in exploration and his ambition to attain something as distant as becoming an astronaut. The beginning of the film includes archive footage of the animation used in a planetarium. Dickens explains that they went back to that idea and found other library shots of planets and stars so the story could close the arc and also communicate a sense of hope.

“What made it work was that the footage was childlike and the story itself is about an innocent child. Again, there’s not much music and no score to add to the realism. At one point in Mangrove the soundtrack breaks into the infectious tune “Skinhead Moonstomp” by British reggae and ska band Symarip. It is used by Dickens to ironically comment on the be-wigged attire and formal ceremonies of the all-white court and to cut together a series of stills showing the modernizing of London, the tearing down of old houses and the build of new highways. Symarip was a group of white musicians working with the beats originated in the Afro-Caribbean.

“Steve wants you to present ideas to him. He won’t tell you necessarily what he wants, so you have this freedom to respond to the story. I just felt that this track, “Skinhead Moonstomp,” felt right because it subtly undercuts the united front that the state was trying to present against counterculture black or white.”