Spike Lee braves confinement to film deserted New York

He was to chair the 73rd Cannes Film Festival, the opening of which was to take place on Tuesday. The Covid-19 pandemic came to play a part in the festivities, preventing the event from taking place on the Croisette. Recluse at his home in New York, thousands of kilometers from the beaches of the Riviera, Spike Lee kills time by filming a strangely empty city.

The American director braved confinement to venture into the deserted streets of the city that never sleeps, the new epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic. The result: a magnificent three-and-a-half-minute love letter to the Big Apple and its caregivers, cradled by the New York, New York by Frank Sinatra, which can be seen in a short video posted on the filmmaker’s Instagram page.

A tribute to caregivers

Spike Lee walks us through the five districts of the city that he has never stopped filming since his beginnings, from Coney Island to the Bronx via Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. We can of course see the Wonder Wheel, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge … So many monuments that the seventh art has made shine around the world. But here, it is the New Yorkers on the front line in the fight against the coronavirus that Spike Lee decides to make shine by dedicating the second part of this video to them. Firefighters, paramedics, improvised hospital staff in Central Park, pharmacists … After showing a New York emptied of its inhabitants, the director films the faces of these strangers, “Everyday hero” that we applaud at the window here as on the other side of the Atlantic.

In addition, in a tweet posted a few days earlier, Spike Lee announced that his next feature film Da 5 Bloods, will be available on June 12 on Netflix. A story of Vietnam War veterans carried by Chadwick Boseman, star of the film Black Panther, and French actor Jean Reno.

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