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The author Alex Wheatle was raised in an abusive South London children’s home before landing in a Brixton halfway house as a teenager in the early 80s; he published his first novel—the incendiary and cathartic Brixton Rock—in 1999. Yet Steve McQueen’s narrativization of Wheatle’s early life ends well before the writer rose to prominence. In his cinematic debut, Sheyi Cole acts as adolescent Alex embroiled in the turbulent lead-up to 1981’s Brixton uprising, during which he would be arrested and incarcerated. As in Small Axe as a whole, McQueen engages reggae music (The Abyssinians, The Flames and Johnny Clarke), reading and education (C. L. R. James’ The Black Jacobins stands out as a foundational text), as well as images of racialized police brutality. Archival photographs of the still-unsolved New Cross house fire and the enormous, Black-led protests that erupted in its wake powerfully interrupt the film halfway, opening room for recognition, reflection and rage. Helen Scott’s meticulous production design and Jacqueline Durran’s vibrant costumes add texture to an already audio-visually sumptuous work, while Alastair Siddons contributes an engrossing and altogether fiery screenplay.

Concluding the Small Axe anthology, Education takes seriously the titular Jamaican proverb popularized in 1973 by Bob Marley: “If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.” Unearthing a triumph of Black collective resistance to institutionalized racism, this one-hour film chronicles an aspiring astronaut (Kingsley Smith, played superbly by a thirteen-year-old Kenyah Sandy) in an uphill fight against the segregation of immigrant and working-class youth in 1970s England into so-called “special schools.” Catalyzed by Bernard Coard’s scathing pamphlet How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System, parents and activists ultimately establish a supplementary educational infrastructure, offering hope for future generations. Shabier Kirchner’s naturalist 16mm cinematography evokes the BBC cinema of Alan Clarke and Ken Loach; meanwhile, Mica Levi (aka Micachu) uses extraordinary electronic sounds to inject selected moments with rhythm and dread. Education would not be a Small Axe chapter without a potent dose of impeccably curated songs (Roxy Music, Small Faces), counterbalanced here by a cringeworthy rendition of “House of the Rising Sun” based on McQueen’s own experience in the UK school system.