Spike Lee is paying tribute to the city and state he has grown to love. The award-winning directory released a short film titled New York, New York which honors the city and is set to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s classic song of the same name.
Lee described the short-film as a “love letter” to the city and its residents who found themselves in the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.
“To be honest, I really try not to dictate what the people should feel … there are many different feelings there,” Spike Lee said during an appearance on CNN. “It’s bittersweet. It’s painful at the beginning—what you see, there’s nobody there. But at the end of the film, that’s where we see New Yorkers … I wouldn’t want to be any other place in the world but here. The epicenter.”
New York has seen more than 327,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 across the state with nearly 21,000 deaths. In New York City alone, there have been more than 178,000 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus.
You can check out Spike Lee’s New York, New York below.
The coronavirus mainly comes from animals and a majority of those who were infected early either worked at or frequently visited the Huanan seafood wholesale market in Wuhan, according to The Guardian. The virus is similar to Severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (Mers).
The Wuhan coronavirus is transmitted from person to person through “droplet transmission.” That means an infected person can pass the virus by sneezing or coughing on another person as well as by direct contact.
While a majority of the cases have been detected in the United States and China — with more than 76,500 deaths in the United States and more than 1 million confirmed cases — it has now reached many countries around the world. It has also been confirmed in Italy, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and many other eastern countries.
