So director Steve McQueen (who is not the same person as the actor Steve McQueen, a fact which took me way too long to realize) made an anthology series of five films called Small Axe; this is the first of them. It’s on Amazon Prime, though it’s listed as a TV show there, presumably because that’s the only way they could put “episodes” into the series. But wherever you draw the line between TV and movies these days, this is a movie.

So this is actually a true story about… well, I guess you’d say it’s about a key legal case in the civil rights era in London (the movie is set from 1968-1971), but the thing is, really it’s about a guy who’s opened up a Trinidadian restaurant that becomes a community gathering place for the Black community in Notting Hill, and which is subjected to a campaign of harassment and violence from the police, trying to close it down.

And so more than anything else, what it’s really about is these people trying to live their life in a time and place where the authorities and the system are stacked against them, and their long fight for… not even justice, as such, but just to be free of constant police violence.

Some of the people respond militantly (Letitia Wright plays a Black Panther, which is presumably a pun-not-intended bit of casting), others are weary and want to just stop fighting, but of course the awful reality is that you can’t stop fighting when your very existence is the matter under contention.

It’s obviously, and depressingly, a movie that’s “ripped from today’s headlines” even though it’s about events half a century in the past, but it’s more than just a piece of topical social commentary — McQueen paints a portrait of a neighborhood and community, and peoples it with characters who are more than just their court case.

These Small Axe movies are making a lot of year-end “best of” lists, and deservedly so. Recommended.