Raoul Peck

Raoul Peck (born 9 September 1953 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a Haitian filmmaker, of both documentary and feature films. He is known for using historical, political, and personal characters to tackle and recount societal issues and historical events. Peck was Haiti's Minister of Culture from 1996 to September 1997. His film ''I Am Not Your Negro'' (2016), about the life of James Baldwin and race relations in the United States, was nominated for an Oscar in January 2017 and won a César Award in France. Peck's HBO documentary miniseries, '' Exterminate All the Brutes'' (2021), received a Peabody Award.

Peck is also the founder of Velvet Film, a film production company in Paris, New York, and Port-au-Prince. He also founded "El Dorado Forum" (Port-au-Prince, Haiti) in 1995, a center that supports the creativity and enrichment of artists.

Early years and education

Peck was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. At the age of eight, Peck and his family (he has three brothers including Hébert Peck) fled the Duvalier dictatorship and joined his father in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). His father Hebert B. Peck, an agronomist, worked for the United Nations FAO and UNESCO and had taken a job there as professor of agriculture along with many Haitian professionals invited by the government to fill positions recently vacated by Belgians departing after independence. His mother, Giselle, would serve as aide and secretary to mayors of Kinshasa for many years. The family resided in DRC for the next 24 years.

Peck attended schools in the DRC (Kinshasa), in the United States (Brooklyn), and in France (Orléans and economics at Berlin's Humboldt University. Peck always had artistic dreams, but these were frowned upon in Haiti, his home country. He then decided to wait until after completing his studies at Humboldt University to return to Haiti and pursue his cinematic career. He said, "It's what saved me. I didn't come to Europe thinking that I was going to stay. I knew that I had to educate myself as much as possible, then return to Haiti secretly if need be." Peck later spent a year as a New York City taxi driver and worked (1980–85) as a journalist and photographer before earning a film degree (1988) from the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) in West Berlin.

Political career

Peck served as Minister of Culture in the Haitian government of Prime Minister Rosny Smarth (1996–97), ultimately resigning his post along with the Prime Minister and five other ministers in protest of Presidents Préval and Aristide. He detailed his experiences in this position in a book, ''Monsieur le Ministre… jusqu'au bout de la patience''. Prime Minister Smarth wrote an afterword for the book, and Russell Banks wrote the preface to the first edition. On the book's re-release in 2015, Radio Metropole Haïti reviewed it as a portrait of "a formidable democratic movement that profoundly changed the country."

Filmmaking career

Peck initially developed short experimental works and socio-political documentaries, before moving on to feature films. In 1982, he directed his first short film, ''De Cuba traigo un cantar'', which described the visit of " Carlos Puebla y Los Tradicionales," a Cuban group that played traditional Cuban music, to West Berlin and their concert for peace. He also directed ''Leugt'' (1983), another short, whose topic was Ronald Reagan's visit to Berlin and the violent protests that arose. Then, in 1983, he continued with ''Exzerpt'', where he took on a critical and playful point of view on Grüne Woche (Green Week), the biggest dietary and agricultural fair in Germany. In 1984, he directed ''Merry Christmas Deutschland'', a report about the history lessons of Christmas day in Helmut Kohl's 1984 Germany.

In 1986 Peck created the film production company Velvet Film in Germany, which then produced or co-produced all his documentaries, feature films and TV dramas.

While still at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB), Peck shot his first feature film, ''Haitian Corner'' (1987), produced by his newly founded company, Velvet Film. The film portrays a Haitian man exiled in New York trying to forget being tortured by François Duvalier's secret police. When he accidentally runs into a man he recognizes as a former torturer, part of the " Tontons Macoutes," he must choose between vengeance and forgiveness.

A few years after Peck directed ''Haitian Corner'', a producer asked him to write a screenplay about a Swiss doctor's "downward spiral" in Africa before returning to his native country as a "liberated" man. However, Peck made a counteroffer and attempted to launch a fiction project around Patrice Lumumba for the first time. This project questioned the point of view of the "black" hero, which was contrary to the usual approach where a "European" character told this genre, which investors accepted more readily (example: Steve Biko in ''Cry Freedom''). Because of these challenges, Peck decided to produce a creative documentary instead. In 1991, this turned into '' Lumumba, Death of a Prophet'', a film about the death of Patrice Lumumba in 1961; the 'father of Congo's independence.' Peck wanted to emphasize Lumumba's place in the continent's history.

Two years later in 1993, Peck returned to a more Haitian- specific theme with a feature, '' The Man by The Shore'', a fictional story about the beginning of " Duvalierism" and the implementation of the process of terror through the eyes of an eight-year-old girl. The story of "Sarah, a girl who accepts her past demons and decides to live with them," got him a nomination for a Palme d’Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. ''The Man by the Shore'' was the first Haitian film to be released in theatres in the United States.

One year after ''The Man by The Shore'' premiered, Peck directed the documentary ''Desounen, Dialogue with Death''(1994). The documentary, which contains a fictitious narrator and real interviews with Haitians, focuses on the tragedies caused by the economic collapse of Haiti, and explores how different people cope.

That same year (1994), Peck wrote and directed ''Haiti, Silence of the Dogs'', which documented the confrontation between the democratically-elected Haitian President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide (who was in exile in the U.S.) and his prime minister, Robert Malval (who stayed in Haiti trying to establish democracy and opposing the military-appointed president, Emile Jonassaint).

Raoul Peck also received the '' Nestor Almendros Prize of Human Rights Watch'' in 1994. Six years later in 2000, the same organization gave him the '' Irene Diamond award'' for his work in favor of human rights.

In 1998, Peck was commissioned by the museum curator, Catherine David, to create a video essay about documenta X, a contemporary art exhibition, in Kassel, Germany: Chère Catherine.

Later that year (1998), Peck directed ''It's Not About Love'', commissioned by the French television channel '' Arte''. This mystery about exile and memory centers around a woman born in Haiti and living in New York City, and was the start of his collaborations with the producer Jacques Bidou.

Peck received international attention for '' Lumumba'', his 2000 fiction feature film about Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and the period around the independence of the Belgian Congo in June 1960.

Raoul Peck has also made his film debut on television. In 2005, he teamed up with American TV network HBO to release his film ''Sometimes in April'', about the Rwandan genocide. The film starred Idris Elba.

Five years later, Peck was elected Chairman of La Fémis, the French state film school, on 10 January 2010. He has since been replaced with Michel Hazanavicius. Then, a book of screenplays and images from four of Peck's major features and documentary films, called ''Stolen Images'', was published in February 2012 by Seven Stories Press.

Peck continued his journey in the film industry when he was named as a member of the Jury for the Main Competition at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. He won the Best Documentary prize at the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival in 2013 for '' Fatal Assistance''.

The Belgian segment of the shoot for his film '' Le Jeune Karl Marx'' (''The Young Karl Marx'') resumed in October 2015. The film is about the friendship between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels