Spike Lee To Direct Colin Kaepernick Documentary For ESPN Films
Netflix
By Joshua Meyer/Feb. 7, 2022 11:21 am EST
A press release (via Variety) described Lee’s documentary on Kaepernick as follows:
“Kaepernick, who has never given a full, first-person account of his journey, is collaborating closely with Lee who plans to use extensive new interviews and a vast never-before-seen archive to help Kaepernick tell his story from his perspective.”
Kaepernick played for the San Francisco 49ers from 2011 to 2016, leading his team to their first Super Bowl since 1994. During the 2016 NFL season, he famously began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial oppression. In 2017, then-President Donald Trump suggested that NFL players who protested in such a manner should be fired, and Kaepernick subsequently became a free agent and went unsigned by any team, thereby cutting short his football career.
Since picking up his first Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay with “BlacKkKlansman,” Lee has enjoyed a career resurgence, with many citing his 2020 Netflix war drama, “Da 5 Bloods,” as an example of a film that should have also received a nomination for Delroy Lindo’s performance. “Da 5 Bloods” was one of the late Chadwick Boseman’s final films, and it also featured an up-and-coming Jonathan Majors, who has since gone on to star in “Lovecraft Country” and “The Harder They Fall.” However, Lee also has many documentary credits to his name, such as “4 Little Girls” and “When the Levees Broke,” and he’s always kept one foot in that world, with his most recent project being the HBO documentary miniseries, “NYC Epicenters 9/11→2021½.”
If anyone can be trusted to give Kaepernick a frank platform for revisiting his public life, it’s Lee. ESPN Films, meanwhile, also delivered a probing, much-talked-about documentary of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls with “The Last Dance” in 2020, so having it set its sights on a prominent NFL figure is sure to engender some buzz. This as-yet-untitled, multi-part Colin Kaepernick documentary by Spike Lee doesn’t have a release date yet, but we’ll keep you posted.
Since picking up his first Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay with “BlacKkKlansman,” Lee has enjoyed a career resurgence, with many citing his 2020 Netflix war drama, “Da 5 Bloods,” as an example of a film that should have also received a nomination for Delroy Lindo’s performance. “Da 5 Bloods” was one of the late Chadwick Boseman’s final films, and it also featured an up-and-coming Jonathan Majors, who has since gone on to star in “Lovecraft Country” and “The Harder They Fall.” However, Lee also has many documentary credits to his name, such as “4 Little Girls” and “When the Levees Broke,” and he’s always kept one foot in that world, with his most recent project being the HBO documentary miniseries, “NYC Epicenters 9/11→2021½.”
If anyone can be trusted to give Kaepernick a frank platform for revisiting his public life, it’s Lee. ESPN Films, meanwhile, also delivered a probing, much-talked-about documentary of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls with “The Last Dance” in 2020, so having it set its sights on a prominent NFL figure is sure to engender some buzz.
This as-yet-untitled, multi-part Colin Kaepernick documentary by Spike Lee doesn’t have a release date yet, but we’ll keep you posted.
