For Raoul Peck, documentaries have the power of resurrection. In cinemas on December 25, the Haitian director's new film, Ernest Cole, Lost and Found, winner of the Œil d'or at the Cannes Film Festival 2024, is bringing a forgotten South African reporter back to life. Through his clandestine photos, in 1967, Ernest Cole was the first to show the horrors of apartheid. To be able to publish his pictures, he fled South Africa for the US, where he died alone in poverty in 1990. It was Cole's nephew who approached Peck, whose previous film I Am Not Your Negro (2016) he admired. This multi-award-winning documentary had brought African-American writer James Baldwin back into the spotlight.

Born in 1953 in Port-au-Prince, Peck left Haiti at the age of 8. Fleeing François Duvalier's dictatorship, his parents settled in the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly the Belgian Congo, where his father, an agricultural engineer, had been recruited by the United Nations to help revive the country which had just gained independence. But the unstable political situation forced the family into exile once again, this time in New York. Peck was sent to a Jesuit boarding school in Orleans, France. His friends at the time imagined him becoming an ambassador. But he had already left for Germany, to study engineering, before entering the prestigious Berlin Film and Television Academy.

You have 50.53% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.