Renowned as a storyteller on screen, Brooklyn filmmaker Spike Lee engages as a storyteller in person too. His cinema career began on a summer day in 1977 when he was “doing nothing.”
“There’s one day that changed my life,” he said Friday during “An Evening with Spike Lee” at AMC 14 NewCity where he accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Chicago International Film Festival presented by Cinema/Chicago. “I wasn’t doing nothing.”
He visited a friend in New York City who was always studying for tests. He spotted a box in her place. Inside was a Lentar Super-8 camera, a gift from her father that she was not using. “I’m going to be a doctor,” she told him. “I don’t need this.” Lee used it to document street life in the summer 1977.
Throughout revisiting his oeuvre of 25 dramas and documentaries during “An Evening with Spike Lee. In Conversation with Dr. Jacqueline Stewart,” the Oscar-winning filmmaker generously credited countless helpers, including Vietta Johnson, now an orthopedic surgeon who practices in Englewood. He asked her to stand up with her family in recognition for lending him his first camera.
Before accepting the award (which meant Lee had to skip a game of his beloved New York Knicks), the auteur and raconteur attended a noon screening of his latest feature “Highest 2 Lowest” also at AMC NewCity 14, 1500 N. Clybourn Ave.
Stewart, a Kenwood Academy alum, once taught courses on Spike Lee at Northwestern and the University of Chicago, where she teaches in cinema and media studies. She wrote her undergrad thesis on that audacious indie. During the Friday event, she scored Lee’s autograph on her special edition pair of Air Jordans saluting Mars Blackmon, the character Lee played in his debut feature “She’s Gotta Have It.”
In introductory remarks Friday evening, Mayor Brandon Johnson concluded: “This generation can look back on this moment, and realize it was the film as a storyteller, the artists that protected our democracy, defended our humanity.”
Lee has used his films to explore race, crime and other political issues, including in his controversial 2015 film “Chi-Raq,” which is set in Chicago and focuses on gang violence in the city. In the movie, Father Mike Corridan (John Cusack) is modeled after Father Michael Pfleger, senior pastor of the Faith Community of St. Sabina. The character refers to black-on-black crime as “self-inflicted genocide.” In an interview with Deadline Hollywood at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015, Lee said: “I would just be irresponsible as a filmmaker to not comment on this self-inflicted genocide, which is happening.”
Asked on the festival’s red carpet to review “Chi-Raq,” Johnson said: “There’s been a reputation about our city that I have worked hard to dispel. So my position is we want to make sure that we’re telling the full story of who we are as a city. I’m working hard every single day to ensure that the accurate depiction of who we are is on display and not just one aspect. Art is supposed to be provocative.”
Born in Atlanta, young Lee and his family briefly lived in Chicago. His late brother Chris was born here, where his father worked as a jazz musician. “At that time Chicago was a place to be for a jazz musician. Then we moved to Brooklyn. On the low! I always had love for Chicago. Great city, great people, a lot of history here, a lot of history, herstory here,” he said.