Steve McQueen’s film opened the 2020 BFI London Film Festival.
The film Mangrove, directed by British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, opened this year’s London Film Festival on October 7. Part of a collection of five films, called Small Axe, Mangrove is due to be released on November 15, on the BBC and on Amazon. For the time being, McQueen’s film is touring the film festivals across the world with its deeply important message. Both Mangrove and Lovers Rock, the two films from the Small Axe anthology selected at this year’s canceled Cannes Film Festival competition, will be showing across select cinemas and online during the London Film Festival in the U.K. Mangrove is based on a true story. Frank Crichlow (played so brilliantly in McQueen’s film by Shaun Parkes) is the owner of a West Indian restaurant named “Mangrove” in London’s neighborhood of Notting Hill. The restaurant is popular amongst locals, intellectuals, activists and artists. Nina Simone, Diana Ross, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley have all been known to have frequented the place. Frank’s place is, however, frequently raided by police, who seem intent on ransacking the restaurant for no real reason, apart from their blatant racial discrimination. The racial discrimination of the police is made crystal clear in the film. One sequence shows PC Pulley (Sam Spruell) explaining to a rookie policeman that they just arrest the first black man they see on the street without any grounds or reason to arrest him. The film suggests that PC Pulley in particular enjoyed these altercations. The film shows him often with a sly grin on his face, as he destroys Frank’s restaurant, or when at the sight of a mother crying and shouting at the police when she discovers her son badly beaten up by the police.
