Hollywood director Spike Lee has on Tuesday denounced the state of race relations in the United States three decades after he first shook audiences in Cannes with films on bigotry and violence, drawing parallels with the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
Lee, the first Black person to head up the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, said little had progressed since ‘Do The Right Thing’ premiered on the French Riviera in 1989, a Brooklyn-based tale of spiraling racial tensions and police brutality with a startling resonance now.
“When you see brother Eric Garner, when you see king George Floyd, murdered, lynched… you would think, you would hope that thirty-some motherfucking years later Black people would stop being hunted down like animals,” Lee told a news conference in Cannes, where the world’s biggest cinema showcase is due to kick off.
The former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22-1/2 years in prison by a judge in June for Floyd’s murder during an arrest in May 2020.
Video of Chauvin kneeling on the neck of the handcuffed Floyd for more than nine minutes caused outrage around the world, and the verdict was widely seen as a landmark rebuke of the disproportionate use of police force against Black Americans.
Meanwhile, Eric Garner was killed in a deadly chokehold by a white police officer during a 2014 arrest. His dying words, “I can’t breathe” became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.
Lee’s darkly funny ‘Do The Right Thing’, in which tempers fray and led to a deadly outcome over the course of boiling hot day in Brooklyn – outraged some critics when it was first released, with some claiming it would encourage riots.
Lee is an Hollywood veteran who has directed and produced more than 35 films since 1983 through his production company 40 Acres And A Mule. His movies include Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Jungle Fever (1991), Malcolm X (1992), Crooklyn (1994), Clockers (1995), 25th Hour (2002), Inside Man (2006), Chi-Raq (2015), BlacKkKlansman (2018) and Da 5 Bloods (2020).
