spike lee and dee rees celebrate black film in milan

Filmmakers Spike Lee and Dee Rees (Mudbound, Pariah) are hosting a conversation with Chicago artist Theaster Gates to kick off a Black culture movie marathon at Milan’s Fondazione Prada Film Festival during the city’s Fall Fashion Week. Scheduled for 10 AM this Friday, September 21st, the talk will also feature curator Okwui Enwezor. Afterwards, audiences will be treated to nine films until 7 AM Saturday, allowing “audiences to immerse themselves in an intense, exceptional cinematographic experience, creating resonances and intersections between visual fragments and aesthetic investigations in different films,” according to a press statement.

The nine classic selected by Gates, are Body and Soul (1925) by Oscar Micheaux, Carmen Jones (1954) by Otto Preminger, The Defiant Ones (1958) by Stanley Kramer, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) by Melvin Van Peebles, Killer of Sheep (1977) by Charles Burnett, Do the Right Thing (1989) by Spike Lee, Daughters of the Dust (1991) by Julie Dash, I Am Not Your Negro (2016) by Raoul Peck and Moonlight (2016) by Barry Jenkins. Curiously no films by Dee Rees, however.

The marathon screening and conversation accompanied the Theaster Gates’ exhibit, “The Black Image Corporation,” which is now showing at Fondazione Prada in Milan.

MILAN, ITALY – SEPTEMBER 19: Spike Lee, Tonya Lewis Lee and Theaster Gates attend Opening Of Theaster Gates’ Exhibition ‘The Black Image Corporation’ At Fondazione Prada Osservatorio on September 19, 2018 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Elisabetta Villa/Getty Images for Fondazione Prada)