Look Again. Jan 19 – 29, 2012 Park City, Utah

When his mom deposits him at the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn to spend the summer with the grandfather he’s never met, young Flik may as well have landed on Mars. Fresh from his cushy life in Atlanta, he’s bored and friendless, and his strict grandfather, Enoch, a firebrand preacher, is bent on getting him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Only Chazz, the feisty girl from church, provides a diversion from the drudgery. As hot summer simmers and Sunday mornings brim with Enoch’s operatic sermons, things turn anything but dull as people’s conflicting agendas collide.

Playfully ironic, heightened, yet grounded, Spike Lee’s bold new movie returns him to his roots, where lovable, larger-than-life characters form the tinderbox of a tight-knit community. A story about the coexistence of altruism and corruption, Red Hook Summer toys with expectations, seducing us with the promise of moral and spiritual transcendence. Spike is back in the ’hood. - C.L.

Spike Lee is in his fifteenth year of being a professor of film at his alma mater, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he is also the artistic director. He is a third-generation Morehouse man, Class of ’79. Red Hook Summer is the latest installment in his ongoing chronicles of Brooklyn—She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right Thing (1989), Crooklyn (1994), Clockers (1995), and He Got Game (1998).