Worldwide screening day: Raoul Peck's "I Am Not Your Negro"

"I Am Not Your Negro" premiered at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the coveted People's Choice Award in the documentary category and went on to win a Berlinale Panorama Audience Award plus 30 more. Peck is highly critical of the media but believes in the power of film: "We are in the middle of a big swamp of ignorance that is taught by a lot of nonsense, propaganda, absurdity, amalgams. You feel like you want to stop the TV every two seconds to rephrase them, because it's lie after lie, turning stuff upside down, and you can't follow that. That's the trap. ... I tend to believe that film can try to save what still can be saved, in terms of our histories, our memories. We are living in very quick times, and we have a new generation who basically know nothing about events 30 years ago."

Raoul Peck is a Haitian-born filmmaker and screenwriter who became internationally known through the documentary "Lumumba: La mort du Prophète" (1990) and the feature film "Lumumba" (2001), among others. He studied industrial engineering and economics at Berlin's Humboldt University before earning a film degree from the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) in West Berlin, just before the fall of the Wall. In 1986 Peck had already created the film production company Velvet Film in Germany, which he then moved to Paris, New York and Port-au-Prince to produce or co-produce all of his documentaries, feature films and TV dramas. (filmography)

"It's not about the past," Peck, the former cab driver and Haitian ex-culture minister, once said, "it's about knowing your history so that you can fight in the present. Otherwise, you don't know who the real enemy is, what the real issue is, because it had been covered by many layers of bad information, of lies, and manipulation." Peck has six projects in development, including the TV mini series "The Assassination of Malcom X," "The Black General," "Enfant Unique" and "Le Voyage" as producer and "Les Cris" and "Violences Policieres" as director-producer. His next documentary, "Amexica," is in post-production and upcoming HBO mini series "Exterminate all the Brutes," starring Josh Harnett, will tackle European colonialism.

Watch Raoul Peck's thoughts on "I Am Not Your Negro":

Race and History: A Conversation with Raoul Peck (Doc Conference at TIFF 2016)

In "I am Not Your Negro," director Raoul Peck brings a fresh and radical perspective to the current racial narratives in America. In this keynote conversation, he discusses what drew him to make this critical film, his inventive approaches to history throughout his career, as well as sourcing and selecting his archive.

Advice on starting your edit (at Bertha DocHouse)

Referring to his 2016 BAFTA Award-winning film as a “creative documentary”, Raoul Peck gives us an insight into his six-year-long editing process, and how he managed to create a structure for the film.

Why Raoul Peck wanted to tell Karl Marx’s story after "I Am Not Your Negro" (BUILD Series interview):

Raoul Peck, writer and director of “The Young Karl Marx,” (trailer) starring August Diehl and Vicky Krieps, explains why he chose to tell Marx's story after "I Am Not Your Negro," and why he wanted to tell it now. "We forgot that Martin Luther King, Jr. changed his discourse toward the end of his life because he understood that the real fundamental problem of this country was not just race, it was class. It was the economic situation of not only poor blacks but also the poor white part of the population and everything in between."

Praise for "I Am Not Your Negro":

"Baldwin re-emerges as a devastatingly eloquent speaker and public intellectual; a figure who deserves his place alongside Edward Said, Frantz Fanon or Gore Vidal." -- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

"Baldwin's fury and his despair come through in vivid fashion, making this film not just an important social document, but an essential work of art." -- Bilge Ebiri, Spirituality & Health

"[It] isn't just a biography of an intellectual or a history lesson about resistance towards white supremacy. The film is all of that, and more, a clear-eyed examination of the ugly wound in the land of the free." -- Tim Brennan, About Boulder


image: Raoul Peck at the 2017 Berlinale photo Elena Ringo CC BY 4.0