Sam Fourness

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.

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.

LuLu, a shy but adventurous six year-old loses her mother in a supermarket when distracted by a confectionery display. On her quest to find her mother, with the countdown to the shops close already started, without fear she bravely navigates her way back to her mother whilst forging new friendships along the way.