*Spike Lee will be in Charlottesville, Virginia this fall to appear as a special guest at the 30th annual Virginia Film Festival, where he’ll present his Oscar-nominated documentary “4 Little Girls.”
The film chronicles the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that left four African-American girls dead. The hate crime served as a catalyst for the civil rights movement.
Lee’s presentation will be a part of a larger program around the living legacy of slavery, presented in collaboration with James Madison’s Montpelier, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The program will include a short video piece, titled “I Can’t Breathe,” which combines footage of the chokehold death of Eric Garner with footage of the similar death of the character Radio Raheem in Lee’s 1989 film “Do The Right Thing.”
The fest is scheduled for November in Charlottesville, the site of recent racial tension where white supremacists rallied to protest the removal of a Confederate monument from the University of Virginia campus. At the protest, a domestic terrorist rammed his car into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer.
The Virginia Film Festival is a program of UVA and the office of the provost and vice provost for the arts.
“We first reached out to Mr. Lee in the spring to include him in our upcoming collaboration with Montpelier, and, of course, the recent events in Charlottesville have made his participation more compelling, relevant and vital,” said Jody Kielbasa, director of the VFF and vice provost for the Arts at UVA.
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