Raoul Peck

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.[7] 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) where he earned a baccalaureate, before studying industrial engineering and economics at Berlin's Humboldt University.[1] 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."[8] 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.[1]

Peck in 2014 at a conference in Frankfurt

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.[9] 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.[10] 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."[9]

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.[11] 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.[12]

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.[13]

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.[14]

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).[15] 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.[16]

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.[17][18] 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.[19] The Man by the Shore was the first Haitian film to be released in theatres in the United States.[20]

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.[21]

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).[22]

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.[23]

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.[24]

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.[25]

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.[26][27]

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.[28]

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.[1]

Cannes Film Festival 2012 Jury
(Raoul Peck is sixth from left)

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.[29]

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.[30] He won the Best Documentary prize at the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival in 2013 for Fatal Assistance.[31]

The Belgian segment of the shoot for his film Le Jeune Karl Marx (The Young Karl Marx) resumed in October 2015.[32] The film is about the friendship between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of the Communist Manifesto, during their youth.[33]

More recently in 2021, Raoul Peck continued his partnership with HBO by directing a four part docu-series, Exterminate all the Brutes (April 2021). In this series about the genocidal aspects of European colonialism, Peck uses Sven Lindqvist's book Exterminate All the Brutes, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past to expose the realities of the past and recount the "story of survival and violence." Peck himself narrates the series using both old and new footage and animation to propose white supremacy has been at the historic center of nations and has led to "exterminations" of people around the world. Peck sets a suspenseful tone to the trailer by ending with the words, "Neutrality is not an option... Over the centuries we lost all bearings because the past has a future we never expect.”[34] The series already has a score of 82% on Rotten Tomatoes and has been described as a "fresh, current and revelatory documentary."[35][36]

In 2023, Peck directed and produced Silver Dollar Road for Amazon Studios, revolving around a family's land who becomes subject to harassment by land developers.[37][38][39]

Since the beginning of his career, Raoul Peck's filmography reflects an ensemble of films with a particular writing style. His subjects are historical, political, and personal characters. His work considers his fragmented biography (with the intellectual and economic conflicted perspective). It also structurally exploits the effectiveness of American cinema. In this way, he uses more complex approaches like collages, time overlay of the story, flash-forward, or flashback, the recurrent use of voice-over, the author, character, and the object point of view according to the needs of the project. These multiple approaches, both formal and structurally aesthetic, allow for the organic mix of politics, history, poetry, and the personal.[2]

Peck divides his time between Voorhees Township, New Jersey, U.S.; Paris, France; and Port-à-Piment, Haiti.[65]

• Human Rights Watch's Nestor Almendros Prize (1994)[1]
• Sony Special Prize, Locarno Festival (for Chère Catherine, 1997)
• Human Rights Watch's Lifetime Achievement Award (2001)[1]
• Procirep Prize, Festival du Réel (for Lumumba—Death of a Prophet, 2002)[66]
• Best Documentary, Montreal World Film Festival (for Lumumba—Death of a Prophet, 2002)[67]
• Jury member, Berlin International Film Festival (2002)
• Human Rights Watch's Irene Diamond Lifetime Achievement Award (2003)[1]
• Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival Best Documentary Prize for Fatal Assistance (2013) [31]
• Oscar nomination in the Best Documentary Feature category for I Am Not Your Negro, 89th Academy Awards[68]
• Peabody Award for Exterminate All the Brutes (2021)[6]

• J'étouffe. (2020) Éditions Denoël. ISBN 978-2-207-16238-5 (In French)
• Monsieur le Ministre... Jusqu'au bout de la patience. (2016) Velvet Editions. ISBN 978-2-913416-00-0 (In French)
• Stolen Images: Lumumba and the Early Films of Raoul Peck. (2012) Seven Stories Press. ISBN 978-1-60980-393-3
• Peck, Raoul. (22 Feb 2018). Baldwin and Marx - Same Struggle? Talkhouse.
• Peck, Raoul. (1 Feb 2017). Journeying With James Baldwin: A Personal Note from the Director of I Am Not Your Negro. Guernica.
• Peck, Raoul. (3 July 2020). James Baldwin Was Right All Along. The Atlantic.

• James Baldwin
• Russel Banks
• Jacques Bidou
• Pascal Bonitzer
• Velvet Film

Baldwin, J, Peck, R, Strauss, A, (2017). I Am Not Your Negro: A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck. Vintage International. ISBN 978-0-525-43469-6

Pressley-Sannon, Toni (2015). Raoul Peck: Power, Politics, and the Cinematic Imagination. LEXINGTON BOOKS. ISBN 978-0-7391-9878-0

Velvet Film Company

• Raoul Peck at IMDb
• California Newsreel page on Lumumba: La mort du prophète
• Garry Pierre-Pierre, "AT LUNCH WITH: Raoul Peck;Exporting Haitian Culture to the World", The New York Times (Movies), 8 May 1986
• "Moloch Tropical" by Raoul Peck - Pacificfreepress.com, July 2010