Steve McQueen & BBC Team for Doc Series on Race Relations

Academy Award winner Steve McQueen is directing Uprising, a three-part series for BBC One that spotlights three pivotal events from 1981 that shaped race relations in the U.K.

The doc series will cover the New Cross Fire, which killed 13 Black teenagers; Black People’s Day of Action, which saw more than 20,000 people join the first organized mass protest by Black British people; and the Brixton riots.

With James Rogan directing alongside McQueen, the series will reveal how these three events intertwined in 1981 and how, in the process, race relations were defined for a generation.

McQueen, director and executive producer, said: “It is an honor to make these films with testimonials from the survivors, investigators, activists and representatives of the machinery of state. We can only learn if we look at things through the eyes of everyone concerned; the New Cross Fire passed into history as a tragic footnote, but that event and its aftermath can now be seen as momentous events in our nation’s history.”

Charlotte Moore, BBC Chief Content Officer, said: “It has been an honor to work with Steve McQueen to bring these powerful stories to BBC One. With his visionary genius as a filmmaker, he has created an incredibly important and evocative series that charts events that have defined race relations in Britain today, giving a voice to the people at the heart of these stories.”

Rogan, director and executive producer, said: “The New Cross Fire that claimed the lives of so many young people and affected many more remains one of the biggest losses of life in a house fire in modern British history. What happened and how Britain responded to it is a story that has been waiting to be told in depth for 40 years. In the series, survivors and the key participants will give their account of the fire, the aftermath, the impact it had on the historic events of 1981 and the profound legacy it has left behind.”