PMA Films: “Eve Biddle Selects”: Do the Right Thing (1989)

About this event

Directed by Spike Lee. Rated R. 120 minutes. In English. Screens as part of “Eve Biddle Selects: Beautiful People Doing Impossible Things,” a companion to the exhibition “Eve Biddle: Wonderlands.” 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. — Criterion Collection Beautiful People Doing Impossible Things I watch movies to be transported to another world. Because I play with scale and color in my art practice, I think a lot about how my images are kind of impossible. No human has a hand 24 inches long. No landscape is cyan blue. These images exist in a kind of Wonderland of my own imagining — much like the fantastical plots of the movies in this series. Each feature is paired with a short film by my partner, Joshua Frankel — another beautiful person doing impossible things. —Eve Biddle Do The Right Thing paired with Joshua Frankel’s One and the same body (2025, 3 minutes) Frankel’s award-winning hand-made animation of his memory of synchronous fireflies, encountered with Biddle serendipitously on their honeymoon, is paired with Spike Lee’s masterpiece about life on one block in Brooklyn. In their own ways, these films tell stories about unique individuals responding to each other, driven by forces outside themselves,…