The Culture Show Podcast

Callie Crossley leads this month's  Wednesday Watch Party with GBH’s Jeremy Siegel, host of In Common, and Culture Show contributor Lisa Simmons, Artistic and Executive Director of the Roxbury International Film Festival and program manager at Mass Cultural Council. 

We're  revisiting Spike Lee’s landmark 1989 film Do the Right Thing. Set in Bed-Stuy on the hottest day of the summer, the film is funny, combative, exuberant and ultimately devastating, using blazing color, a restless camera and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” to explore race, policing, neighborhood change, ownership and belonging. Nearly 40 years later, we consider what the film understands about the way prejudice builds through insults, resentments and competing claims to the same place — and why so much of what Lee put on screen remains recognizable today.