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SPEAKING UP: Spike Lee

ON MONDAY (May 14) Spike Lee delivered a passionate speech at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which called out President Donald Trump and the white nationalists involved in last summers Charlottesville Rally.

At the incendiary press conference, the filmmaker said that Trump was wrong not to denounce the far right rally, which resulted in the death of a female counter-protester.

As he unveiled his new film BlacKkKlansman set in 1970’s America, Lee used footage of the white nationalist driver who ploughed his way into the crowd at the end of the film.

He said: “I was given Susan Bro’s phone number. She is the mother of Heather Heyer, who got murdered when that car came crashing down the street.

I was not gonna put that murder scene in the film without her blessing. Mrs. Bro said, ‘Spike, I give you permission to put that in.’ Once I got permission, I said, ‘Fuck everybody else, that motherfucking scene is staying in the motherfucking movie.’ Cuz that was a murder,” he continued.

Spike Lee said: “And we have a guy in the White House — I’m not gonna say his fucking name — who defined that moment not just for Americans but the world, and that motherfucker was given the chance to say we are about love, not hate.

And that motherf**ker did not denounce the motherf***ing Klan, the alt-right, and those Nazis motherf**kers. It was a defining moment, and he could have said to the world, not just the United States, that we were better than that.”

He continued: “The so-called American cradle of democracy, that’s bullsh*t. The United States of America was built on the genocide of native people and slavery.

That is the fabric of the United States of America. As my Brooklyn brother, Jay-Z would say, facts. That scene had to go in.”

“So this film, to me, is a wake-up call because stuff is happening, and it’s topsy-turvy and the fake has been trumpeted as the truth.

That’s what this film is about. I know my heart, I don’t care what the critics say or anybody else, but we are on the right side of history with this film,” he said.

At the end of the monologue, he told the audience: “Please excuse me for some profane words but the sh*t that’s going on, it makes you want to curse. Thank you.”

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