Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

Story

DOCUMENTARY Raoul Peck’s search for traces of an overlooked anti-apartheid photographer develops the power of an international thriller. Ernest Cole, a S African photographer, was the first person to bring the horrors of apartheid to a worldwide audience. His book House of Bondage, which he published in 1967 at the age of just 27, forced him into exile for the rest of his life in New York and Europe, where he never felt at home. Raoul Peck retraces Cole’s paths through life, his inner conflicts as an artist and his daily fury at the Western world’s silence or complicity in the face of the crimes and injustice of the apartheid regime. And how 60,000 negatives of his work were discovered in 2017 in the safe of a Swedish bank.

 

 

Presented by

Director

RAOUL PECK (*1953 auf Haiti) studied Film at the German Film and TV Academy in Berlin. His breakthrough came in 1992 with his film essay Lumumba: Death of a Prophet. His documentary I Am Not Your Negro about author James Baldwin was nominated for an Oscar in 2017.