Spike Lee

Spike Lee's films are, in his own term, a Lee joint, and he turns up in most of them himself. Do the Right Thing passes on one stifling hot summer day in Brooklyn; it opens by telling an ordinary day in a neighbourhood, and then the racial tension boils in the heat and sets Mookie, the pizza deliveryman, who is Lee, in motion. Only two nominations came to the film at the Academy Awards, and best picture that year went to Driving Miss Daisy, which looked at race relations far more timidly. His first, She's Gotta Have It, was shot in black and white with one dance scene in colour, a modern romantic comedy following Nola Darling's life among three lovers. Malcolm X runs two hundred and two minutes. Get on the Bus took an honourable mention at the 1997 Berlinale.