ERNEST COLE, LOST AND FOUND © Ernest Cole
Raoul Peck in the Footsteps of Ernest Cole
In Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck delves into the soul of the famous South African photographer and, through a highly personal portrait, recounts the complicit attitude of the Western world towards the horrors of the apartheid regime.
South African photographer Ernest Cole was the first to expose the horrors of apartheid to the world. His book House of Bondage, published in 1967 when he was just 27 years old, led him to exile in New York and Europe for the rest of his life, where he never regained his bearings.
After I Am Not Your Negro (2016), dedicated to the African-American writer James Baldwin, and the mini-series Exterminate All the Brutes (2021), which revisited seven centuries of racist violence in four episodes, the Haitian documentary maker, known for his masterful narration, once again turns his camera to an unfairly overlooked destiny.
Raoul Peck narrates the wanderings of the photographer, his torments as an artist and his daily anger at the silence or complicity of the Western world regarding the horrors of the apartheid regime. He also recounts how, in 2017, 60,000 negatives of his work were discovered in the vault of a Swedish bank.
In this thriller-style documentary, the filmmaker exposes the artist’s soul while delving into the complexities of the ‘concept of race’ through his timeless imagery.
