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.
Bawdy, tongue in cheek and powered by a soundtrack of hip-hop, gospel, R&B and soul, the film plays up its theatrical origins. 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.
