Steve McQueenâs Lovers Rock is Sight & Soundâs Best Film of the Year
McQueen tops the poll for second time following his first win for Hunger in 2008, while McQueenâs Mangrove also appears in the poll at number 13
WINNER: Best film of the year
SIGHT AND SOUND, the BFIâs international film magazine, announced last week that Steve McQueenâs
Lovers Rock, part of the directorâs five-film Small Axe anthology, has been chosen as the Best Film of the Year.
These films, which played in primetime Sunday night slots on BBC One having earlier premiered at festivals, also highlight how the line between cinema and TV seems to have become more blurred
In the first two episodes of Steve McQueen’s quintet of films, collectively titled
Small Axe, the artist and film-maker points his lens at two distinct but related spaces of Black social pleasure: a Caribbean restaurant in Notting Hill in the late 1960s, and a house party in the same area a decade later. Both of these are, to varying degrees, embattled, from without and within.
The first film
,
Mangrove, takes its title from the historic Mangrove Restaurant, established on All Saints Road in 1968 by the community activist Frank Crichlow. It tells the story of the ‘Mangrove Nine’, a group of activists who led protests over the campaign of racist harassment against the restaurant by local police. In 1970 they were charged with incitement to riot, which led to a landmark 55-day trial.
BBC News
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image captionLovers Rock stars Michael Ward and Amarah-Jae St Aubyn
Director Sir Steve McQueen has said things are changing for black British filmmakers, after Lovers Rock was named film of the year by the BFI-backed publication Sight & Sound.
The second in Sir Steve s five-film Small Axe TV series topped the magazine s poll of the best 2020 releases, ahead of Time, and First Cow.
His collection celebrates British black culture and its Caribbean heritage.
He said the environment is a little more fertile than it s ever been . To be honest with you, black and brown-skinned people have not been really welcomed into the film and television community, he told BBC Breakfast on Friday.