Spike Lee recently compared George Floyd’s death to his 1989 cult classic film Do The Right Thing in a new short film.
In Do The Right Thing, which garnered Lee two Academy Ward nominations, Radio Raheem (portrayed by Bill Nunn), a black man, gets into an altercation with the white owner of a pizzeria in New York City.
Radio is then forcibly removed from the pizza shop by law enforcement, who ends up putting the man in a chokehold, killing him.
Spike Lee recently tweeted a powerful short film that fused a scene from Do The Right Thing along with cellphone footage of the police killings of Floyd and Eric Garner, who died in 2014 after being placed in a chokehold by former New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo.
The new short film is called 3 Brothers.
Last year, Pantaleo was fired. Last week, Floyd died after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck, stopping him from breathing. Chauvin has since been charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter, according to the Star-Tribune.
“What we’re seeing today is not new,” Lee said an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, over the weekend. “We’ve seen this again and again and again, and people are asking the same questions: ‘Why are people rioting? Why are people doing this?’ Because people are fed up and people are tired of the debasing, the killing of Black bodies. That’s what this country is built upon.”
Spike Lee’s new forthcoming film Da 5 Bloods, is slated to be released June 12 on Netflix. Watch Lee’s short below.