Watch: Director Spike Lee Releases Short Film Amid Black Lives Matter Protests

Director Spike Lee released a short film on Sunday amid Black Lives Matter protests that are occurring across the nation. In Lee’s film titled 3 Brothers, he compares the deaths of George Floyd and Eric Garner to the death of a character from his 1989 movie Do the Right Thing: Radio Raheem.

Lee posted 3 Brothers on both his Twitter and Instagram accounts.

The character, Radio Raheem, is similar to Floyd and Garner in that all three men died due to police brutality.

Lee begins his one-and-a-half minute film asking the question, “Will history stop repeating itself?” The clip pieces together scenes from the arrests and deaths of Floyd and Garner with those of character Radio Raheem who died after being choked by the police.

In an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, Lee said: “How can people not understand why people are acting the way they are? This is not new, we saw with the riots in the ‘60s, the assassination of Dr. King, every time something jumps off and we don’t get our justice, people are reacting the way they do to be heard…We are seeing this again and again and again…This is the thing: The killing of black bodies, that is what this country is built upon.”

Floyd died on May 25 in Minneapolis, Minnesota after police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for over eight minutes. Garner died in 2014 due to a police officer’s chokehold. Both men were recorded crying out “I can’t breathe,” before their respective deaths.