Roshawn Hewitt

An anthology series of five stories looking at the lives of a group of friends and their families in London’s West Indian community from the late 1960s to the early 80s.

In the Wild West in the 1860s and 1870s, Sarah and John have founded New Babylon, a city of outcasts of all backgrounds. Haunted by the murder of his family eight years earlier, Django is still looking for his daughter, believing she may have survived the killing. When Django shockingly finds her in Babylon, about to marry John, Sarah - now a grown woman - wants Django to leave fearing he'll put Babylon in jeopardy. But Django, believing the city is in danger, is adamant that he will not lose his daughter twice.

When day becomes night, a strict curfew forces ordinary people to go pedal to the metal in a deadly race for freedom. During this contest, alliances and friendships are both made and lost.

In inner-city Portsmouth, an unremarkable newsagent’s sits between a courthouse and a business centre. It’s here that sparks fly between well-dressed Kyle and equally poised Jamie. Yet despite their outward appearances, both are struggling to move on from hardship they’d rather keep hidden. As their feelings for one another blossom, their pasts resurface, threatening to break them apart before their relationship has even begun.

A Black boy’s journey through an ineffectual public school system reveals the racial inequities built into everyday British life. Young Kingsley Smith (Kenyah Sandy) is a spirited aspiring astronaut with a love of drawing whose life is turned upside down when he is thrust into a new school for the “educationally subnormal”—a harrowing experience that gradually awakens his mother (Sharlene Whyte) to the institutional mistreatment of the children of West Indian immigrants. Shot on Super 16 mm to evoke BBC television dramas from the 1970s, the final Small Axe film concludes the pentalogy with a hopeful vision of the power of Black-led collective action.