BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Director: Spike Lee Run Time: 135 min. Rating: R Release Year: 2018
Starring: Adam Driver, Alec Baldwin, John David Washington, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace
Country: United States, China
Language: English
About the film:
From visionary filmmaker Spike Lee comes the incredible true story of an American hero. The film won the Grand Prix at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and received six nominations at the 91st Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won for Best Adapted Screenplay.
It’s the early 1970s, a time of great social upheaval as the struggle for civil rights rages on. Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) becomes the first African-American detective on the Colorado Springs Police Department, but his arrival is greeted with skepticism and open hostility by the department’s rank and file. Undaunted, Stallworth resolves to make a name for himself and a difference in his community. He bravely sets out on a dangerous mission: infiltrate and expose the Ku Klux Klan.
Posing as a racist extremist, Stallworth contacts the group and soon finds himself invited into its inner circle. He even cultivates a relationship with the Klan’s Grand Wizard, David Duke (Topher Grace), who praises Ron’s commitment to the advancement of White America. With the undercover investigation growing ever more complex, Stallworth’s colleague, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), poses as Ron in face-to-face meetings with members of hate group, gaining insider’s knowledge of a deadly plot. Together, Stallworth and Zimmerman team up to take down the organization whose real aim is to sanitize its violent rhetoric to appeal to the mainstream.
Produced by the team behind the Academy-Award® winning Get Out, BlacKkKlansman offers an unflinching, true-life examination of race relations in 1970s America that is just as bracingly relevant in today’s tumultuous world.
About the filmmaker:
Spike Lee is an award-winning director, producer, writer, actor, author, and a tenured professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. A champion of independent filmmaking, his work challenges cultural assumptions about race, class, and identity. He served as jury president at the 74th Cannes Film Festival, the first African-American to do so for the storied festival. In all, Lee has had seven films premiere at Cannes: She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), Girl 6 (1996), Summer of Sam (1999), Ten Minutes Older (2002), and BlacKkKlansman (2018), which won him the Grand Prix and went on to receive a Best Picture nomination at the 91st Academy Awards. Some of his other notable films include Malcolm X (1992), 4 Little Girls (1997), 25th Hour (2002), and Da 5 Bloods (2020).
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