Spike Lee’s upcoming film, BlacKkKlansman, produced by Get Out director Jordan Peele, is another button-pushing look at race relations that was made more urgent by the events that transpired in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer. Lee is putting his finishing touches on the movie, which will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 14.
Lee’s latest film, based on a memoir by Ron Stallworth, centers on an African-American cop who infiltrated the Klu Klux Klan in the 1970s. The cop duped Grand Wizard David Duke and became the head of a local chapter in Colorado. It promises to be the hottest ticket on the festival’s lineup because of the renewed visibility of the Klan in the wake of last summer’s Unite the Right rally that left one counter-protestor, Heather Heyer, dead. John David Washington, son of Denzel Washington, stars as Stallworth, and Adam Driver plays his partner on the police force. The film came together in record time by Hollywood standards, says The Hollywood Reporter, after Get Out producer Sean McKittrick brought Jordan Peele a copy of Stallworth’s book, and he asked Lee to direct. Production had just begun last summer when the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville occurred.
Lee is one of the few American filmmakers who got an invite to Cannes this year. Nearly 30 years ago, he lost out on the festival’s biggest award, the Palme d’Or, for Do the Right Thing.
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