Black Cinema Series: Do The Right Thing

Name: Black Cinema Series: Do The Right Thing
Start: 2025-09-25T18:00:00-06:00
End: 2025-09-25T20:00:00-06:00
Location: Center for Contemporary Arts

September 25, 2025 @ 6:00 pm

CCA’s Black Cinema Series is curated by Anpa’o Locke, please join us for an introduction to “Do The Right Thing” prior to the screening!

Set on one block of Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy Do or Die neighborhood, at the height of summer, this 1989 masterpiece by Spike Lee confirmed him as a writer and filmmaker of peerless vision and passionate social engagement. Over the course of a single day, the easygoing interactions of a cast of unforgettable characters—Da Mayor, Mother Sister, Mister Señor Love Daddy, Tina, Sweet Dick Willie, Buggin Out, Radio Raheem, Sal, Pino, Vito, and Lee’s Mookie among them—give way to heated confrontations as tensions rise along racial fault lines, ultimately exploding into violence. Punctuated by the anthemic refrain of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” Do the Right Thing is a landmark in American cinema, as politically and emotionally charged and as relevant now as when it first hit the big screen.

About the Curator:

Anpa’o Locke is an Afro-Indigenous writer, filmmaker, and curator who is Húŋkpapȟa Lakota and Ahtna Dené (Village of Tazlina), born in the Standing Rock Nation and now residing in Albuquerque, New Mexico.She was a 2023 Native Lab Fellow and a 2022 Full Circle Fellow at the Sundance Institute, where she developed her upcoming short film Kawá, which follows an Afro-Indigenous teen reconnecting with her Native roots. Anpa’o’s work is dedicated to amplifying Indigenous narratives in cinema. In 2023, she co-curated Imagining Indigenous Cinema at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. This groundbreaking series highlighted over 40 films by US-based Indigenous artists in the post-Standing Rock era. She has also worked as a writer for PBS Digital Studios’ Sovereign Innovations and as an Associate Producer for Best Case Studios.