A week after George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer, Spike Lee premiered a short film entitled 3 Brothers on a CNN special hosted by Don Lemon. The film, which is still available on Lee’s Instagram account, is only 94 seconds long. It opens with five words in red juxtaposed against a black no-background: “Will History Stop Repeating Itself?”

For a minute and a half, footage of the real-life killings of George Floyd and Eric Garner is interspersed with the fictional death of Do the Right Thing’s Radio Raheem (played by the late, great Bill Nunn). All three clips depict unarmed Black men, suffocated and killed by white police officers. Each episode is filled with a chorus of desperate pleas from horrified onlookers. They are eerily similar scenes. Like three instruments playing the same tune in three different octaves.

What makes 3 Brothers so affecting is the morose timelessness of the source material to which it is indebted. Released in 1989, amid the turbulence of the Reagan-and-Bush-era war on drugs, Do the Right Thing is an examination of trauma, community, and uprisings as a form of political action. Starring Lee as the protagonist Mookie, a delivery man at Sal’s Famous Pizzeria—the only white-owned business in the neighborhood—the film takes place over the course of one day, on a single block in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy. Set in the midst of a record heat wave, it focuses on the minutiae of everyday life in the neighborhood, only later revealing how vulnerable the Black and Brown bodies that populate it are to police violence.

[Read Lex Pryor on Do the Right Thing and how it relates to the current sociopolitical climate in America.]