Set during a watershed episode of Black British history, the opening installment of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe dramatizes the early years (1968-1971) of the Mangrove, a Caribbean restaurant in West London’s neighborhood of Notting Hill. Established by Frank Crichlow, the tavern was a hotbed of West Indian activism and community organizing—or what The Guardian later described as “a small piece of decolonized territory” in an otherwise white supremacist empire. In the longest and most genre-bending of the anthology’s five films, McQueen brings to screen both the inextinguishable joy of food, fraternity and diasporic belonging as well as the racist state’s desperate, incessant attempts at tyranny. Mangrove was initially designed as two independent films: whereas its first half approximates tropes of American westerns (centering a reformed male hero opening a legitimate business, only to encounter the ire of a bigoted sheriff), the second veers closer to the aesthetic and narrative conventions of courtroom drama. (The dialogue is sourced almost verbatim from journalistic records of a real-life trial.) Toots & The Maytals’ “Pressure Drop” bookends a film that is as historically textured as it is intimately affecting, and as locally anchored as it is transculturally universal.