Steve McQueen Comes Home

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Steve McQueen is the director of four feature films, including the Oscar-winning “12 Years a Slave.” His new series, “Small Axe,” which is streaming on Amazon, consists of five portraits of the West Indian community in London from the late nineteen-sixties through the nineteen-eighties. For McQueen, the stories allowed him to reflect on painful aspects of his own upbringing in that time and place—like the way many children of immigrant families were shunted into “subnormal” schools. “I wanted to feel that I exist,” McQueen tells Richard Brody. “This is part of the narrative of the world, part of the narrative of life. And sometimes things like that never get seen or never get noticed or never get the recognition.” Plus, the staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar on what happens to families in Haredi Jewish communities when one parent leaves the faith.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:08.6	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. There's a new series streaming now on Amazon that is unlike anything else you'll see right now. It's called Small Acts. And it's the work of the British director, Steve McQueen.
0:22.4	The New Yorker's Richard Brody was just blown away by Small Axe, and he spoke with Steve McQueen
0:26.7	recently. Here's Richard.
0:29.0	Steve McQueen is the director of four feature films, hunger, shame, and widows, and is best known
0:35.5	as the director of the Oscar-winning 12 years a slave.
0:39.3	Do I upset the master than the mistress? Do you care less about my loss than their well-being?
0:44.3	Master Ford is a decent man.
0:45.3	He is a slaver!
0:46.3	Under the circumstances, he's a slaver.
0:49.3	But you truckle at his boot.
0:51.3	No.
0:52.3	You luxuriating his favor.
0:53.3	I survive!
0:56.0	Steve McQueen's new project is called Small Axe.
0:59.8	It's on the BBC in the UK and Amazon here, but it's not actually a TV series.
1:05.9	Rather, it's a collection of five separate feature films, each of which deals with a different aspect of the
1:11.4	lives of West Indian people in London from the late 1960s through the 1980s.
1:17.6	These are new men, new types of human beings. It is in them that are to be found. All the
1:25.6	traditional virtues of the English nation, not in decay,
1:30.0	as they are in official society, but in full flower.
1:34.1	Rita, because these men have...
	...

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