REBIRTH OF A NATION: A COLLABORATION WITH THE HUMAN RIGHTS ARTS & FILM FESTIVAL

7:00PM – DO THE RIGHT THING
Spike Lee (1989) 120 mins R

This fevered celebration of multi-racial Brooklyn in the midst of a blistering heatwave remains Lee’s defining and most triumphant “joint”. So iconic is the film that the street on which it was shot is now called Do the Right Thing Way. Fired by the music of Public Enemy and a wonderful score by Lee’s father, and shot with punchy aplomb by Ernest Dickerson, Lee orchestrates a hugely dynamic web of characters in an exuberant masterwork of inventive humanism.

Starring Ossie Davis, Danny Aiello, Rosie Perez, Ruby Dee, Spike Lee, John Turturro, Samuel L. Jackson and Bill Nunn as the indelible Radio Raheem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muc7xqdHudI

9:15PM – THE GREAT FLOOD
Bill Morrison (2012) 80 mins

The spring of 1927 saw the most destructive river flood in American history, the wild, untamed Mississippi River causing mass migration to the cities and accelerating the dissemination of the already rich musical legacy of the black American South. For this collaboration with composer Bill Frisell, Morrison scoured archives for images of the devastation, assembling the degraded debris into a haunting web of experience and memory. Frisell’s remarkable score, itself gleaned from the musical memories of the devastated plains, escalates the film into the poetic sublime.