A strike against violence: Spike Lee’s powerful film, Chi-Raq, set in Chicago in 2015, is an impassioned plea to end gun crime. With dialogue incorporating rap and hip-hop, it is a flamboyant version of ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes’ comedy, Lysistrata, from 411 BC, in which women go on a ‘sex strike’ in protest against a prolonged war, the Peloponnesian War. The title is an amalgam of Chicago and Iraq, with Lee furiously presenting the shootings between black gangs in Chicago’s South Side as part of a cycle of poverty, inequality and pervasive machismo.
‘All that social outrage clearly demanded similarly outsized treatment, and Lee and co-writer Kevin Willmott have found a remarkably accommodating vessel in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, whose tale of an ancient Greek heroine leading an anti-war sex strike has been updated here as an alternately soulful and scalding, playful and deadly serious 21st-century oratorio.’ Variety review, Justin Chang (2015)
The cast includes Teyonah Parris as the voice of reason, Lysistrata; Samuel L. Jackson as a one-man Chorus, and John Cusack as a priest campaigning for social justice.
The screening will be introduced by Dr Kerry Phelan, Lecturer in Ancient Classics, Maynooth University.
Irish Film Institute, Sunday February 2nd, 3.40 pm.
