Lovers Rock offers joyful reprieve from the harder truths in Steve McQueen's Small Axe anthology ThuThursday 17 updated FriFriday 18 DecDecember 2020 at 3:10am Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn makes her screen debut in the film opposite the BAFTA 2020 Rising Star award recipient Micheal Ward (Top Boy). ( Print text only Cancel Director Steve McQueen (Widows, 12 Years a Slave) time travels back to 1980 to honour a marginalised but much-mythologised reggae house-party scene in Lovers Rock — the high point of his five-part anthology Small Axe. The series of stand-alone films — named for a proverb popularised by a defiant Bob Marley song: "If you are the big tree, we are the small axe" — are being broadcast on the BBC in McQueen's home country, powerfully inserting themselves into mainstream discussions of British identity, history and race.