’Ernest Cole: Lost and Found’ Director Raoul Peck: ‘There Is a Fight to Be Had About the State of the World’

variety.com:

Gregg Goldstein Raoul Peck‘s life is as fascinating as his films, filled with unexpected twists and turns. From his early stints as a cab driver and journalist, to a minister of culture post in his native Haiti, to teaching, to founding his Velvet Film production shingle to his breakthrough when he earned an Oscar nomination as producer/director with the James Baldwin doc, “I Am Not Your Negro,” the common denominator is Peck’s drive to make life better through his work. “I went into film because there were things I wanted to say, to express or deconstruct,” he explained. “And there is a fight to be had about the state of the world and wherever I’m living.” On May 20, Peck will have his third Cannes premiere with the Special Screenings doc “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.” It chronicles the life of a South African photographer — another of Peck’s past professions — who published a 1967 book, “House of Bondage,” revealing the horrors of life under apartheid.

The film got off the ground when the late lensman’s family contacted Peck about a huge trove of negatives recently found in a Swiss bank deposit box, revealing portraits of Black Americans in New York and the South with disturbing parallels to Cole’s homeland.

The mystery of how the photos got there, and Cole’s life as an expatriate struggling in the U.S., are equally powerful. The film’s portrait of South Africa also has unsettling parallels to Peck’s experiences in Haiti. “You hear the words of [Ronald] Reagan, [Margaret] Thatcher and [Jacques] Chirac saying, ‘We shouldn’t boycott South Africa because we’d hurt the very people we want to help.’ [Yet] there was no problem boycotting Russia, even though big numbers of the population there were suffering,” he noted.