Haitian director Raoul Peck guest of honour at Swiss film festival

Raoul Peck 2023 Invision

Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck is the guest of honour at the next "Visions du Réel" documentary film festival in Nyon. The director of I Am Not Your Negro will review his filmography, which has been shaped by emancipatory struggles.

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Peck will take part in the next edition of “Visions du Réel”, held from April 4 to 13, with a masterclass and a retrospective of his documentary work. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found , his latest feature film, presented at Cannes in a Special Screening, will be shown in Nyon, according to a press release from Visions du Réel. This tribute is part of a collaboration with the Cinémathèque suisse and the ECAL film department.

Peck, who tells stories from the point of view of dominated peoples, often portrays politicians and writers such as Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1990) or I Am Not Your Negro (2016), Oscar winner for Best Documentary Film, Bafta and César.

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A hybrid series, produced by HBO

Exterminate All The Brutes, a four-part hybrid series produced by HBO, will also be screened during the festival. It offers a journey through time that revisits the history of colonialism. It won a Peabody Award in 2022, and has also spawned a literary and critical essay by Peck.

Raoul Peck was born in Haiti in 1953. As a child, he fled with his parents from the Duvalier dictatorship to the now-independent Congo. Fleeing the violence, he went into exile, attended school in Brooklyn and high school with the Jesuits in Orleans.

Trained as an engineer and economist, he then turned to journalism, photography and cinema, studying in Berlin in the 1970s, a highly politicised city at the time.

From 1995 to 1997, he was Minister of Culture for the Republic of Haiti. A multiple award-winner for his films, he has also been a jury member at the Cannes Film Festival, the Berlinale and the Sundance Film Festival.

The full programme for the 56th edition of Visions du Réel will be unveiled on March 12.

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Translated from French by DeepL/ts

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