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'Four Little Girls' takes director Lee into new territory

movie scenes

July 11, 1997
Web posted at: 6:53 a.m. EDT (1053 GMT)

From Correspondent Michael Okwu

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Director Spike Lee's 11th film finds itself confronting living history this week, both on film and in the news.

"Four Little Girls," Lee's first full-length documentary, focuses on the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, an attack that left four African-American girls dead.

As it turns out, Lee is not the only one with an active interest in the civil-rights era attack. The FBI announced this week that it was reopening the case after a year-long review. Although one man was convicted in the case, authorities have long suspected others were involved.

The bombing was a watershed event in a time of radical change on America's racial landscape. It defined a movement whose embrace of hate and violence was anathema to most Americans.

To the parents of the little girls whose lives were taken over 30 years ago, however, the bombing's consequence was not to change the direction of the civil rights struggle but to change the direction of their lives.

Bombing's legacy

Lee's film uses interviews shot on location and archival footage to weave together a stark recounting of the events surrounding the 16th Street bombing.

Bombing survivor Chris McNair recalls in blunt detail that after the bombing he had to identify his 11-year-old daughter Carol, who died from the blast with a block of concrete wedged in her head.

"There's a legacy and I think its a tragedy that we, as parents and as older generations, do not pass down to younger children," Lee told CNN.

"It just needed somebody to have the guts to pick it up and tell it like it is," said Birmingham victim McNair.

For the provocative Lee, who had already made the reality-based films "Malcolm X" and "Get On The Bus," the film was a first.

When asked why he favored the documentary style for this project over the more familiar dramatic adaptation, Lee replied with typical candor.

"I think a dramatization would have cheapened it," Lee said. Also, a lot of these people are very old, so when they go, their story goes."

"This subject is not to be played with," he added. "Lives were lost behind this incident."

 
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