“Small Axe” Returns

Movies from the 2020 New York Film Festival, which was held online, are returning to Film at Lincoln Center for theatrical screenings (through Aug. 26), along with some crucial extras. The festival showed only three of the five films in Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” anthology, which dramatize real-life stories of Black people in London from the nineteen-sixties through the eighties; the other two, “Alex Wheatle” and “Education,” are now included (they’re also still streaming on Amazon). Both films compress mighty perspectives and passions into mere hour-long spans; both affirm the inseparability of intellectual awakening and cultural consciousness. “Alex Wheatle” tells the true story of a teen-ager in a group home who, having been kept unaware of his West Indian identity and background—let alone the hard realities of Black lives—is guided to political study and engagement, which inspire his later career as a novelist. In “Education,” McQueen tells his own story, of a child shunted into a school for the “subnormal” and rescued by community activists who both exposed official racism and created an independent school that centered Black experience; the film’s grand ending soars with the visionary power of this heritage. (June 11.)