Raoul Peck (born 9 September 1953) is a Haitian filmmaker and director. 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.Jeanne Garane, in "Peck, Raoul", Bill Marshall (ed.), France and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History, ABC-CLIO, 2005, p. 919. 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 life 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 what is now called Kinshasa the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but at the time was called Léopoldville in the Republic of Congo. 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, served as an aide and secretary to mayors of Kinshasa.
Peck attended schools in Kinshasa, DRC, in Brooklyn, New York and in Orléans, France where he earned a baccalauréat, before studying industrial engineering and economics at Berlin's Humboldt University.
Peck waited until after graduating from Humboldt University to pursue his cinematic career as dreams of becoming an artist were frowned upon in Haiti, his home country. 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 under Prime Minister Rosny Smarth (1996–97), ultimately resigning his post along with the Prime Minister and five other ministers in protest of President Préval and President Aristide. Peck 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. In 1983 he directed Leugt, another short, about Ronald Reagan's visit to Berlin and the violent protests that arose. Also 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."Stolen Images", 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, authors of the Communist Manifesto, during their youth.
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.” The series already has a score of 82% on Rotten Tomatoes and has been described as a "fresh, current and revelatory documentary."
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.
In 2024, Peck directed and produced Ernest Cole: Lost and Found revolving around photographer Ernest Cole which had its world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival in May 2024.
Peck is currently in production on Orwell, a documentary revolving around George Orwell for Neon, and a documentary revolving around the Assassination of Jovenel Moïse.
La Bourse où La Vie: Profit and Nothing But! (2000) In 2000, Thierry Garrel, responsible for the Arte documentaries, launched a collection of two by four parts, La Bourse et La Vie. Raoul Peck directed the first part, Profit and Nothing But! in 2001. The film takes audiences through the struggles of his native country, Haiti, as he narrates the story that portrays the burden and the toll that capitalism had on its citizens.
Lumumba (2000)
Raoul Peck decided to go back and take on the character of Patrice Lumumba with a feature film that was accessible to the public. Lumumba was released in 2000 and followed the pivotal story of Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba. Peck used real images to unveil the "unwritten controversial history" of how Lumumba led the Republic of Congo towards its independence in 1960. This was Peck's second film on Lumumba, the first was the documentary film, Lumumba, Death of a Prophet (1990).
When asked why he chose to direct a second film on Lumumba, Peck said, "... when I started research for the feature, I was writing pages and pages and I realized that I was writing for another film. I was creating a film about discovering my own family in Congo and my own memories in Congo. And I rediscovered pictures my mother took and 8mm films my father shot. So all of this brought up a lot for me and the documentary is an expression of my personal relationship to Congo. For me the documentary and the feature film are two different stories. And when I came back to the feature film it was a very direct confrontation with the man Lumumba himself."
Lumumba received eight nominations and won three awards. It was also chosen to be in the Cannes Directors Fortnight. The film won Best Feature Film at the Acapulco Black Film Festival (2001) and the Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (2001), and was the winning film in the United States’ ‘Peace’ category at the Political Film Society (2002). Lumumba has a score of 81% on Rotten Tomatoes.