Raoul Peck, a filmmaker against oblivion

A documentary maker who brings life back to life

For Raoul Peck, the documentary has the power of resurrection. In theaters on December 25, the new film by the Haitian director, Ernest Cole, photographerwinner of The Golden Eye at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, brings a forgotten South African reporter back to life. Through his clandestine photos, Ernest Cole was the first to show the horrors of apartheid, in 1967. To be able to publish his photos, he fled South Africa for the United States, where he died alone, in poverty. , in 1990. It was Ernest Cole's nephew who approached Raoul Peck, one of whose previous films he admired, I'm not your nigger (2016). This multi-award winning documentary brought African-American writer James Baldwin back into the spotlight.

A child of exile

Born in 1953 in Port-au-Prince, Raoul Peck left Haiti at the age of 8. Fleeing the dictatorship of François Duvalier, his parents settled in the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Belgian Congo, where his father, an agronomist, was recruited by the United Nations to help revive this country which had only just gained access to independence. But the unstable political situation pushed the family into exile again, this time to New York. Raoul Peck is sent to high school in France, to a Jesuit boarding house in Orléans. His friends at the time then imagined him becoming an ambassador. But he has already gone to Germany, to pursue engineering studies, before joining the prestigious Film and Television Academy in Berlin.

You have 50.07% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.