In 1981, Great Britain suffered a series of racially-charged rioting (most famously in London's Brixton district), triggered by popular anger at aggressive policing and underlying social deprivation. In this series of three films, Steve McQueen sets these in the context of a fire in New Cross that had occured the year before, in which several young black people had died, and which the community believed had been started by a racist attack. McQueen's interviewees capture the sense in which black Britons felt that the state saw them as its enemy; newspaper headlines and television reports show clearly the endemic racism in society at that time. It's the third film, linking the fire to the subsequent riots, which really pays off for me: you get an understanding of how a riot, destructive and awful as it may be, could have felt like liberation to its participants. Today, Brixton is gentrified, and our society feels relatively calm and racially integrated; but there are still huge imbalances of wealth and power. We are by no means immune from another reckoning.
Review of Uprising
