Visions du Réel is delighted to announce that the Guest of Honour for its 56th edition (4 – 13 April) will be renowned Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. His participation in the next edition of the Festival will include a masterclass and a retrospective of his documentaries, along with a festival screening of his latest feature film Ernest Cole: Lost and Found prior to its release in Swiss cinemas. The filmmaker behind I Am Not Your Negro, nominated for an Oscar in 2017, will take a look back at a filmography populated by key figures, embodying the fight for emancipation, and criticising the cultural domination of history’s Eurocentric perspective. This tribute has been made possible thanks to a collaboration between the Cinémathèque suisse and the cinema department at ECAL University of Art and Design Lausanne.
Born in Haiti in 1953, and raised in Congo, New York, France and Germany, Raoul Peck is one of the most important filmmakers of the late 20th and early 21st century. Over the course of the last forty years, the filmmaker has anchored his complex body of work, which includes internationally acclaimed feature films and documentaries, in a deep political commitment. The genesis of his cinematographic tales stems in equal measure from his multicultural personal experience, his journey as an activist, and what he refers to as a “Marxist reading” of the global economy.
An indefatigable narrator of tales as seen from the viewpoint of those subject to domination, Raoul Peck has also questioned the links to capitalism in his own personal history, haunted by the ghosts of colonialism. His films examine omissions from official Western history, shining a light on aspects ignored by this account, often sketching a portrait of politicians or artists who have openly deconstructed it, such as Patrice Lumumba in Lumumba, La Mort du prophète, a feature film released in 1990, followed bythedocumentary Lumumba (2000), James Baldwin in I Am Not Your Negro (2016), and, most recently, Ernest Cole with Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024). Summoning the past to examine the present and rejecting any call to neutrality, Raoul Peck’s work is a reinvention of activist cinema, which he transforms using a cinematographic, poetic and highly subjective language, freely intermingling genres and formats. Exterminate All The Brutes, a hybrid series in four parts (produced by HBO) – which will also be screened during the Festival – is a perfect example of this: it is a journey back in time, a radical re-examination of the history of European colonialism, from America to Africa, using personal, visual and literary narration to starkly revisit the darkest hours in human history right up to the present day. It won a Peabody Award in 2022, and was also the subject of a critical and literary essay.
Raoul Peck was born in Haiti in 1953. As a child, he and his parents fled the Duvalier dictatorship, setting in newly independent Congo. Forced into exile to avoid the bouts of violence erupting post-independence, he studied in Brooklyn and then at a Jesuit school in Orléans. He studied engineering and economics in Berlin in the 1970s which, at this time, was a highly politicised city home to a number of third-world liberation movements and key figures in the anti-apartheid struggle. He then went on to pursue his interest in journalism, photography and cinema.
His films have been screened at numerous festivals and have garnered considerable international critical acclaim and public recognition. His filmography includes L’Homme sur les quais (Festival de Cannes 1993); Lumumba (Directors’ Fortnight, Festival de Cannes 2000); Quelques jours en avril (Berlinale 2005); Moloch Tropical (TIFF 2009, Berlinale 2010) and Meurtre à Pacot (TIFF 2014, Berlinale 2015). In 2017, his film about the writer James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, received an Oscar nominated for Best Documentary Feature. It later took home the Toronto International Film Festival People’s Choice Award and the Audience Award at the Berlinale. In 2018, it won a BAFTA and a César for the Best Documentary Film. His most recent film, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found premièred at a special screening at the Festival de Cannes where it was awarded the L’Œil d’Or.
Raoul Peck’s political commitment has earned him several honours: in 2021, he received the Irene Diamond Lifetime Achievement Award for his human rights work. The same year, he was also awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from DOC NYC and, in 2024, the Outstanding Achievement Award at Hot Docs Festival in Toronto. He has also been a member of the jury at the Festival de Cannes, the Berlinale and the Sundance Festival.
From 1995 to 1997, he served as Minister of Culture for the Republic of Haiti.
Alongside Werner Herzog, Claire Denis, Lucrecia Martel, Jia Zhang-ke, Marco Bellocchio, Claire Simon and Emmanuel Carrère, Raoul Peck takes his rightful place at the table of Guests of Honour from recent years.
1982 – Leugt (short)
1985 – Merry Christmas Deutschland (short)
1988 – Haitian Corner
1991 – Lumumba: Death of a Prophet
1993 – The Man by the Shore
1994 – Desounen: Dialogue with Death
1994 – Haïti, le silence des chiens
1997 – It’s Not About Love
1997 – Chère Catherine (short)
2000 – Lumumba
2001 – Profit and Nothing But!
2005 – Sometimes in April
2006 – L’Affaire Villemin (TV series)
2008 – L’École du pouvoir (TV series)
2009 – Moloch Tropical
2013 – Fatal Assistance
2014 – Murder in Pacot
2016 – I Am Not Your Negro, Oscar®-nominee, BAFTA and César for the Best Documentary
2017 – Young Karl Marx
2021 – Exterminez All the Brutes (TV series)
2023 – Silver Dollar Road
2024 – Ernest Cole: Lost & Found