Spike Lee to unleash latest work at Cannes: ‘Black KKKlansman’

Cannes Film Festival is one of the most elite events to release a new film to gain attention as well as to gauge the industry’s reaction. Spike Lee is no stranger to the event, as it was 30 years ago when he released “Do the Right Thing” and was reportedly dismayed when it didn’t win an award festival. He’s back this year with a documentary that is sure to draw attention just from the title alone, which is “Black KKKlansman.” The film is produced by Jordan Peele and one of its targets is President Donald Trump, who Lee calls a man “on the wrong side of history,” reports the Hollywood Reporter. Based on a memoir by Ron Stallworth, “BlacKkKlansman” centers on an African-American cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s, duped Grand Wizard David Duke and even became the head of a local chapter in Colorado. John David Washington, son of Lee’s three-time collaborator Denzel Washington, stars as Stallworth, and Adam Driver plays his partner on the police force. The Focus Features film promises to be the hottest button at Cannes because of the renewed visibility of the Klan in the wake of last summer’s Charlottesville Unite the Right rally that left one counter-protester, 32-year-old paralegal Heather Heyer, dead. And given that it could also speak to the rise of the far right throughout Europe, the film boosts the prospects of Lee finally capturing the Palme d’Or — an honor that he still feels was unfairly denied him for “Do the Right Thing” nearly 30 years ago.  Says the Hollywood Reporter of Lew, “he remains every bit the political provocateur who uses his films to diagnose the national mood while pressing for change, blaming President Trump for the reawakening of nativism that was on ugly display in Charlottesville.” Lee told the entertainment industry trade, “I just think that his dog whistle stuff has given these people that ‘Come out.’ They get the signal. That’s what happened in Charlottesville.” As for Trump’s post-Charlottesville statements, Lee’s even more damning, adding, “Agent Orange refused to repudiate the Klan, the alt-right and the Nazis. ‘There’s good people on both sides.’ That’s going to be on his gravestone. He’s on the wrong side of history.” The film debuts in the U.S. on Aug. 10, which coincides with the anniversary of the racially-charged incident in Charlottesville, where a Klansman plowed through a crowd of protestors with his car, killing a young white woman, Heather Heyer.