Raoul Peck

Raoul Peck (born 9 September 1953 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a Haitian filmmaker of both documentary and feature films.

He is known for using historical, political, and personal characters to tackle and recount societal issues and historical events.

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.

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.

He also directed Leugt (1983), another short, whose topic was Ronald Reagan's visit to Berlin and the violent protests that arose.

Then, 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.

He also founded "El Dorado Forum" (Port-au-Prince, Haiti) in 1995, a center that supports the creativity and enrichment of artists.

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 Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

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, would serve as aide and secretary to mayors of Kinshasa for many years.

The family resided in DRC for the next 24 years.

Peck attended schools in the DRC (Kinshasa), in the United States (Brooklyn), and in France (Orléans) where he earned a baccalaureate, before studying industrial engineering and economics at Berlin's Humboldt University.

Peck always had artistic dreams, but these were frowned upon in Haiti, his home country.

He then decided to wait until after completing his studies at Humboldt University to return to Haiti and pursue his cinematic career.

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 was Haiti's Minister of Culture from 1996 to September 1997.

Peck served as Minister of Culture in the Haitian government of Prime Minister Rosny Smarth (1996–97), ultimately resigning his post along with the Prime Minister and five other ministers in protest of Presidents Préval and Aristide.

He 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."

Peck initially developed short experimental works and socio-political documentaries, before moving on to feature films.

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.