Spike Lee led attendees at the New York premiere of Oscar-tipped drama Chi-Raq on an anti-violence march to Times Square following the film’s screening on Tuesday night.
Lee’s new film, which is based on the ancient Greek play Lysistrata, depicts a Chicago so riven by gun crime that the wives and girlfriends of South Side gangsters embark on a sex-strike in a bid to halt the violence.
“It was great in 411 BC — it’ll work today,” Lee told Variety at the premiere. “This film is about changing lives.”
Afterwards, the director led orange-hatted supporters from Manhattan’s Ziegfeld theatre down Broadway to Times Square in a “march of solidarity” with Chicago, which in recent days has been hit by protests against the police response to the shooting of unarmed black teenager Laquan McDonald by a white officer. The 17-year-old was shot 16 times by officer Jason Van Dyke – who has been charged with first-degree murder – in October 2014. On Tuesday, city mayor Rahm Emanuel fired the city’s police chief, Garry McCarthy, after a public outcry over the handling of the case.
Lee praised the decision to release police dashcam footage of McDonald’s killing, despite fears that it would prompt violent protest, in a television interview with The Late Show host Stephen Colbert last week. “I think there’s a way to have peaceful demonstrations without tearing stuff up. I’m glad the tape was released,” he said. “This is democracy. I sometimes think we pick and choose what America should see”.
The Oscar-winning director made headlines in the same interview when he claimed a sex strike by women could help prevent sexual harassment on US college campuses. “Second semester it’s going to happen,” he told Colbert. “Once people coming back from Christmas and some stuff jumps off, there’s going to be sex strikes in universities and college campuses across this country.”
Chi-Raq, which has been hailed as Lee’s best film in decades, follows a group of women on the South Side of Chicago who decide to fight gun crime by withholding sex from their men. The film’s title, a portmanteau of Chicago and Iraq, is a reference to the city’s high crime rates, which are comparable to those of a war zone.
The drama, which stars Nick Cannon, Teyonah Parris, Harry Lennix, John Cusack, Samuel L Jackson and Wesley Snipes, was financed by Amazon after Lee and fellow screenwriter Kevin Willmott failed to convince studios to back it for more than a decade. Chi-Raq is expected to screen on Amazon Instant Video after a limited release in US cinemas this weekend to make it eligible for the Oscars.
Anti-Gun Violence March to @TimesSquareNYC lead by @TheRevAl and @MichaelPfleger #GameChangers #ChiRaq #WearOrange pic.twitter.com/HLlpxA5bpm
— CHI-RAQ The Movie (@chiraqthemovie) December 2, 2015
