Small Axe: Mangrove (dir. Steve McQueen).

It’s a powerful reminder of just how much white society anywhere can hate dark-skinned people and immigrants, a British-Caribbean community in the Notting Hill neighbourhood of West London during the early 1970s here, for no real reason other than their own taking out personal frustrations on those deemed less powerful with the hopes of keeping them down or just for amusement.

McQueen’s street-level and courtroom trial dramatization of racial harassment under the guise of law enforcement by corrupt local cops is a necessary recollection of the sins of the past. His account of the galvanizing activists, known as the Mangrove Nine, rising up is searing and unfortunately timely as ever.