The Cannes Film Festival has paid tribute to the ground-breaking U.S. director Spike Lee by putting the Oscar-winning filmmaker on its poster for the 74th Festival de Cannes.
As per The Hollywood Reporter, the image shows Lee in his iconic role as Mars Blackmon, the character from his 1986 feature debut 'She's Gotta Have It', which premiered in Cannes.
Lee revived the Mars character for a series of Nike commercials featuring Michael Jordan. On Mars' hat, in place of the Nike swoosh, the poster showed Cannes' Palme d'Or emblem. Lee could be seen looking up pensively at the palm trees that line Cannes' main throughway, the Croisette.
Lee is the jury president of this year's Cannes festival and will be overseeing the international jury that selects this year's Palme d'Or. The director was set to head up the 2020 jury before Cannes last year canceled the festival due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Cannes called Lee's Blackmon character from 'She's Gotta Have It' "a stereotypical representation of the Afro-American community that the film blows apart," and said it embodied the director's "mischievous eye which, despite constantly questioning and incessantly rebelling for nearly four decades, never neglects entertainment."
Lee is a Cannes regular, having debuted five of his features at the French festival, including 'Do The Right Thing', 'BlacKkKlansman', which won the jury prize, and 'Jungle Fever'. Lee also contributed a short film to the omnibus project 'Ten Minutes Older - The Trumpet', which premiered at Cannes in 2002.
Last year Cannes had said that Lee's Netflix film 'Da 5 Bloods' would have premiered on the Croisette if the festival had gone ahead as planned.
( With inputs from ANI )
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