Steve McQueen‘s “Education” is the fifth and final film in his Small Axe series about being Black in Britain around the 1970s. It’s about children in a school for the “educationally subnormal.”

Via Rolling Stone, McQueen shared that the scene where a teacher forces Kingsley Smith (Kenyah Sandy) and the other children to listen to his grim performance of “House of the Rising Sun” was a real childhood experience of his:

That happened with me! The teacher brought in his guitar, and he started to strum. We’re this captive audience. That was it. But it’s interesting, about that sequence. Because it’s funny, and then it gets irritating, and then you get bored. You have to go through boredom to get to the other side of it, and then you get to something else. And then there’s another understanding of it. So it had to play out that way, in real time.

Watch the whole series on Amazon Prime.

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