When racist riots broke out across the UK in July this year, Mobeen Azhar was better placed to cover the story than most documentary-makers because he had already been investigating it for months. What happened nationally, when hostility towards refugees moved from protest to pogrom, had been foreshadowed in February 2023 in Kirkby, near Liverpool, where a group of angry local people gathered at the Suites hotel, which was being used to house refugees awaiting processing. A standoff with police soon turned nasty.
Small Town, Big Riot follows Azhar as he visits Merseyside in the early months of this year, in the run-up to the sentencing of several Kirkby men for violent disorder and other offences. On his quest to find the source of the disturbance, he talks first to an influencer who tells him that men from the hotel had propositioned young girls. “Quite a lot of children [were] getting approached in parks.”
