An epic piece of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, Mangrove tells the true story of Frank Crichlow, the Trinidad-born owner of a café in Notting Hill who was arrested for protesting the police’s intimidation and brutality. This is a vivid and gripping dramatization of these events and the resulting landmark 1970 court case of Crichlow and the other defendants, who came to be known as the Mangrove Nine.

A movie of tactile sensuality and levitating joy, Lovers Rock is part of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology of decades-spanning films that alight on various lives in London’s West Indian community. Here, McQueen, in an ecstatic yet no less formally bold mode, charts the growing attraction between Martha (newcomer Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and a brooding stranger (Micheal Ward) over the course of one night at a house party.

In Steve McQueen’s vivid adaptation of a true story set in the early ’80s, John Boyega gives an impassioned yet nuanced performance as Leroy Logan, a member of the London Metropolitan police force who both witnessed and experienced first-hand the organization’s fundamental racism.

In 1981, Alex Wheatle lands in a halfway house in Brixton, where he quickly acclimates to the West Indian neighborhood’s customs and styles, forming something like a family with his new friends and acquaintances. But when the Brixton Riots break out, Alex finds himself incarcerated, leading to a political awakening that changes his life forever.

The culminating installment of the Small Axe anthology is a chilling portrait of the British education system in the 1970s, capturing the impossible circumstances facing West Indian students from their very first day of school.