Spike Lee eyes film on U.S. black soldiers in WW2

Director Spike Lee arrives at the 79th Annual Academy Awards in Hollywood, California, February 25, 2007. [Reuters]

Spike Lee will pay tribute to black U.S. soldiers who fought during World War Two with a new film to be shot in Italy.

Lee told Italian daily "La Repubblica" in an interview published on Wednesday that the film, based on James McBride's novel "Miracle at St. Anna," aims to recognise the role of African-American soldiers.

He said their role in the war had been mostly overlooked in previous U.S. movies.

"America started to remember the sacrifice of black soldiers in films on the Vietnam war, but before then, in those on World War Two, they were almost invisible," Lee was quoted as saying.

"I recently met a black veteran who fought at Iwo Jima and he told me how hurt he was that he could not find a single African-American in Clint Eastwood's two films," Lee said.

"Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima," director Eastwood's twin films about the bloody 1945 battle of Iwo Jima told from the perspective of American and Japanese combatants, were released last year.

McBride's book, based on a true story, is the tale of a group of soldiers from the 92nd, all-black Buffalo Division fighting against Nazi occupation in Tuscany, and the friendship between one of them and a six-year-old Italian orphan.

Lee said the contribution by black people to America's war effort at the time was all the more paradoxical given that back at home they were still suffering racial segregation.

"Despite the fact that they had been slaves for more than 300 years and that they were still at the time subject to terrible forms of discrimination, black men fought like heroes.

"They behaved like patriots while their brothers were lynched or at best considered second-class citizens," he said.

Racial issues are a favourite theme for Lee, the director of "Malcolm X," "Do The Right Thing," and an acclaimed 2006 documentary on how Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

In the interview he said World War Two was the last "just war" fought by American troops, criticising the wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.

But he added his new film would not be a propaganda work celebrating only the U.S. soldiers who liberated Europe from Nazi occupation.

"A lot of German soldiers were not faceless evil with no humanity, but simply men fighting on the wrong side: they too were tired, hungry and wanted to go back home."