African American Filmaker and director, Spike Lee has emerged the first ever black jury President at the Cannes Film Festival; and he is using that opportunity to call out racism in America on an international level. During a festival press conference on July 6, the Do the Right Thing director insists that not much has changed since the film premiered in 1989. “A couple weeks ago was the 32nd anniversary of the film,” he said to Chaz Ebert. “I wrote it in 1988. When you see brother Eric Garner, when you see king George Floyd murdered, lynched. I think of Radio Raheem. And you think and hope that 30 motherf*cking years later, Black people would stop being hunted down like animals.”
Spike Lee Calls out Racism
Spike Lee who is 64 years old also called out the corruption of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. “This world is run by gangsters,” he told Yahoo! News. “Agent Orange, this guy in Brazil, and Putin are gangsters. They have no morals, no scruples. That’s the world we live in. We have to speak out against gangsters like that.”
This isn’t the first time he’s spoken about American corruption and racism. In June 2020, he told People about how to fix systemic racism in America. “The inequality between the have and have nots, the racial injustices. This country has to, and must, rectify what’s wrong,” he told the outlet. “We have to make a concerted effort at all levels to address American life, and the areas where we’ve been lacking. All those deaths will have been in vain if we go back to the same thing.”
Spike Lee 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).