The first trailer for Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” dropped Friday, teasing the Letitia Wright-led “Mangrove,” one of the five films featured in the “12 Years a Slave” filmmaker’s upcoming Amazon Prime Video/BBC anthology series.
Per Amazon, “McQueen’s Mangrove tells this true story of the Mangrove 9, a group of Black activists who clashed with London police during a protest march in 1970, and the highly publicized trial that followed. The trial was the first judicial acknowledgment of behavior motivated by racial hatred within the Metropolitan Police.”
Watch the trailer above, in which Wright’s character leads the fight against police brutality and racial injustice.
Wright, Shaun Parkes, and Malachi Kirby star in “Mangrove” alongside Rochenda Sandall, Jack Lowden, Sam Spruell, Gershwyn Eustache Jnr, Nathaniel Martello-White, Richie Campbell, Jumayn Hunter and Gary Beadle.
“Mangrove” was co-written by Alastair Siddons and McQueen.
“Sunday, August 9th, is 50 years since the Mangrove March, which led to nine innocent Black women and men being arrested,” McQueen said in a statement Friday. “It was a march necessitated by relentless police brutality in Notting Hill. To commemorate the bravery of these community activists and the nine who went on to be acquitted of incitement to riot with the judge citing “evidence of racial hatred,” I am sharing the trailer of Mangrove, one of five films to be released under the banner ‘Small Axe.’”
“Small Axe” is “an anthology comprised of five original films set from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s that tell different stories involving London’s West Indian community, whose lives have been shaped by their own force of will despite rampant racism and discrimination,” according to Amazon. ‘This title is derived from the African proverb, ‘If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.’”
Along with “Mangrove,” the films featured in “Small Axe” include “Lovers Rock,” “Alex Wheatle,” “Education” and “Red, White and Blue.”
“Small Axe” is produced by Turbine Studios and McQueen’s Lammas Park for BBC One, with Amazon Studios co-producing in the US. The anthology will premiere on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S. later this year. The series is distributed internationally by BBC Studios.
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