Named for the four-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker Charles Guggenheim, the Symposium honors a filmmaker whose work captures current events, frames history and inspires audiences.

7:00 p.m., Thursday, June 19 at AFI Silver

The 2008 Guggenheim Symposium celebrates award-winning director, producer, writer and actor Spike Lee. Join us for an in-depth conversation between Lee and Denver Post film critic Lisa Kennedy.

Arguably the most provocative filmmaker of his generation, Spike Lee paints on a wide social canvas and is equally prolific in documentary and narrative filmmaking. Few directors have examined race, class and other divisive forces in America with both honesty and a signature aesthetic that blends music and imagery to brilliant effect. His documentary oeuvre includes the Academy Award-nominated 4 LITTLE GIRLS (1997), about the racist bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama church in 1963; the concert film THE ORIGINAL KINGS OF COMEDY (2000); the biography JIM BROWN: ALL AMERICAN (2002); and WE WUZ ROBBED (2002), an unflinching 10-minute deconstruction of the 2000 presidential election. Lee’s most recent documentary is the Peabody Award-winning WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS (2006), a sprawling, exhaustive and furious chronicle of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath which bears witness to this modern American tragedy.