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Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Dystopia Now! In ‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,' Director Raoul Peck Shows How ‘1984' Author Foresaw Today's Authoritarian Drift — Cannes
'Special military operation.' 'Department of Government Efficiency.' 'Enhanced interrogation techniques.' 'Alternative facts.' We live in a time when governments use lexical distortions to manipulate public opinion – the very thing author George Orwell captured so cogently in his dystopian novel 1984, where the futuristic regime adopts 'Newspeak' and other authoritarian techniques to stamp out independent critical thinking. More from Deadline Raoul Peck's 'Ernest Cole' Shares Cannes' L'Oeil D'or Prize For Best Documentary With 'The Brink Of Dreams' Raoul Peck Directing Documentary 'The Hands That Held The Knives' On Assassination Of Haitian President Jovenel Moise Nu Boyana Exec Launches Next Gen Company Hollywood Influence Studios With Stratosphere-Shot Debut 'Above The End' The time is ripe then to reexamine a writer who, though he died 75 years ago, foresaw how leaders of today would gaslight their own people to impose their will and squash dissent. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck takes on that task in his new documentary Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, premiering on Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival. 'A man that died in January 1950, to be that accurate about what is happening today — you better take a second look and try to learn even more from him,' Peck tells Deadline. For his examination of Orwell and his thought, the director drew upon the writer's personal archives. 'The estate allowed me to have access to everything — to published, unpublished [work], private letters, unpublished manuscripts. And that's something, especially in today's world where buying a chapter of a book costs you a fortune,' Peck says. 'It was a gift to be able to have access to everything. It was the same gift I had with James Baldwin' (focus of Peck's acclaimed film I Am Not Your Negro). Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 traces the writer's effort to complete 1984 in the late 1940s as tuberculosis took the last vestiges of his health. He was hospitalized regularly as he worked on the manuscript on the Scottish island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides. The film also dials back to experiences much earlier in Orwell's life that formed his humanistic worldview. In private writings – voiced by actor Damian Lewis – Orwell describes growing up with the ideology common to a Briton of his background (he described himself as 'lower upper-middle class'). He was educated at Eton but instead of following the common path of his classmates to Oxford or Cambridge, he joined the British Imperial Service, working as a colonial police officer in Burma (present-day Myanmar). 'The key to who he became was in Burma. He realized he was there as an imperialist,' Peck observes. 'He was there as a European and doing the worst things a human being can do to normal people — not to combatants, not to communists — to normal people, 'Coolies,' farmers. And he did not like himself. He did not like what he was doing, and he was doing it for the Empire. That was the big break. And he never was able to reconcile that. And he knew he had to keep his critical mind always, no matter who's the boss, no matter who is the king, no matter who's the president, he needs to keep his critical mind.' He threw his lot in with working people, chronicling life on the lower economic rungs in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). He fought fascism in Spain in the 1930s, documenting his experience in Homage to Catalonia (1938). 'The thing that made him interesting to me beside his books, besides his ideas, was the fact that he lived through those things. He wrote from his experience, his own personal experience, not from any intellectual awareness of anything. Not that I'm against that, but there is a sort of credibility that can only be gained from going through those things yourself,' the filmmaker says. 'And this is something he did very frontally, very decisively, and trying to live among the poor, among the disinherited, because that was important to him to feel before he writes, to understand before he can write and to verify what his instinct was. And by the way, he didn't do it from a superior point of view, but he criticized himself as well. He put himself under his own analysis, and he did that very early on.' Orwell described himself as a democratic socialist, but he abhorred the sort of mind control exerted by ostensibly socialist or communist regimes like the USSR and its satellites. Animal Farm, published in 1945 as the Soviet Union was clamping its pincers on Eastern Europe, and 1948 – published at a time when Stalin had drawn the Iron Curtain between East and West – illustrate the moral depravity of the powerful who exert dominance over the powerless. But, as Peck believes, Orwell has wrongly been interpreted as relevant only to an earlier time of Stalinist totalitarianism. Forcing people to accept that 2 + 2 + 5 (as happens in 1984) – how different is being forcefed the lies of Putin that he unleashed hell on Ukrainian civilians to 'denazify' the country? How different is it from Pres. Trump attempting to rewrite reality by describing the January 6 attack on the U.S. capital as 'a day of love'? Orwell saw, as shown in Peck's documentary, that totalitarian regimes engage in 'continuous alteration of the past.' 'Orwell has been put in a little box as an anti-Stalinist or an anti-Soviet, anti-authoritarian regime,' Peck comments. 'But you hear what he says in the film, authoritarians don't all only happen in faraway countries. It can happen as well in the U.K., in the United States and elsewhere. So, the scope [of the film] was from the get-go very wide. For me, it was not just an anti-Trump or anti-whatever agenda.' Peck was born in Haiti but as a child he and his family fled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to escape the dictatorial regime of François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, an authoritarian who enjoyed the support of many successive American governments. That high level hypocrisy – America, the shining beacon of liberty, propping up a dictator – made Peck as acutely sensitive to the abuse of political language as Orwell. 'When Kennedy or Nixon or Johnson, were talking about Haiti, supporting a dictatorship, and the word democracy was in every speech, how could I reconcile that?' he questions. 'You are supporting a guy who has killed thousands and thousands of people, who is keeping his people poor, who is corrupt, where there is torture. So how do you reconcile that? Very early on, I was always suspect of certain words that people were using.' Ultimately, what Orwell was about is asserting the dignity of individuals, especially the downtrodden, against forces of exploitation, be they economic and/or political. He's as relevant to our times as he was to the mid-20th century. 'When you encounter a thinker like Orwell, and you feel, wow, he gets it. He gets what the 'other' is, he has empathy,' Peck says. 'He looks at everybody as a human being, whether you are poor, rich or Burmese or British or a worker in a kitchen in Paris, he sees you first as a human being. And that's very rare. That's very rare.' Best of Deadline 2025 TV Cancellations: Photo Gallery Where To Watch All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies: Streamers With Multiple Films In The Franchise Everything We Know About 'My Life With The Walter Boys' Season 2 So Far
Associated Press
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
It's the end of the world and the Cannes Film Festival does not feel fine
CANNES, France (AP) — 'Is this what the end of the world feels like?' So asks a character in one of the most-talked about films of the 78th Cannes Film Festival: Oliver Laxe's 'Sirât' a Moroccan desert road trip through, we come to learn, a World War III purgatory. It's well into 'Sirât,' a kind of combination of 'Mad Max' and 'Wages of Fear,' that that reality begins to sink in. Our main characters — Luis (Sergi López) and his son Estaban (Brúno Nuñez) — have come to a desert rave in search of Luis' missing daughter. When the authorities break it up, they join up with a bohemian troupe of ravers who offroad toward a new, faraway destination. Thumping, propulsive beats abound in 'Sirât,' not unlike they do at Cannes' nightly parties. In this movie that jarringly confronts the notion of escape from harsh reality, there are wild tragedies and violent plot turns. Its characters steer into a nightmare that looks an awful lot like today's front pages. 'We wanted to be deeply connected to this day and age,' Laxe said in Cannes. As much as Cannes basks in the Côte d'Azu sunshine, storm clouds have been all over its movie screens at the festival, which on Monday passed the halfway point. Portents of geopolitical doom are everywhere in a lineup that's felt unusually in sync with the moment. Tom Cruise, in 'Mission: Impossible – Final Awakening,' has battled AI apocalypse. Raoul Peck, in 'Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,' has summoned the author's totalitarianism warnings for today. Even the new Wes Anderson ('The Phoenician Scheme') is about an oligarch. If the French Riviera has often served as a spectacular retreat from the real world, this year's Cannes abounds with movies urgently reckoning with it. It's probably appropriate, then, that many of those films have been particularly divisive. ''Sirât' is laudable for its it's-time-to-break-stuff attitude to its characters, even if that makes for a sometimes punishing experience for the audience. This is a love or hate it movie, sometimes at the same time. Ari Aster's 'Eddington,' perhaps the largest American production in recent years to sincerely grapple with contemporary American politics, was dismissed more than it was praised. But for a good while 'Eddington' is breathtakingly accurate in its depiction of the United States circa 2020. In 'Eddington,' the conservative, untidy sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) runs for mayor against the liberal incumbent, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), partly over disagreements on mask mandates. But in Aster's small-town satire, both left and right are mostly under the sway of a greater force: social media and a digital reality that can wreck havoc on daily lives. 'I wrote this film in a state of fear and anxiety about the world,' Aster said in Cannes. 'I wanted to try and pull back and just describe and show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore.' Reflecting a world running on a 'new logic' It's been striking how much this year's Cannes has been defined by anxious, if not downright bleak visions of the future. There have been exceptions — most notably Richard Linklater's charming ode to the French New Wave 'Nouvelle Vague' and Anderson's delightful 'The Phoenician Scheme.' But seldom has this year's festival not felt like an ominous big-screen reflection of today. That's been true in the overall chatter around the festival, which got underway with the new threat of U.S. tariffs on foreign-produced films on the minds of many filmmakers and producers. Rising geopolitical frictions led even the typically very optimistic Bono, in Cannes to premiere his Apple TV+ documentary 'Bono: Stories of Surrender,' to confess he had never lived at a time where World War III felt closer at hand. Other films in Cannes weren't as overtly about here and now as 'Eddington,' but many of them have been consumed with the recurring traumas of the past. Two of the most lauded films from the beginning of the festival — Mascha Schilinski's 'Sound of Falling' and 'Two Prosecutors,' by the Ukrainian filmmaker Sergie Loznitsa — contemplated intimate cases of history repeating itself. 'Two Prosecutors,' set in Stalin's Russia, captures the slow-moving crawl of bureaucratic malevolence by adapting a story by the dissident author and physicist Georgy Demidov, who spent 14 years in the gulag. Loznitsa said his film is 'not a reflection of the past. It's a reflection of the present.' In the period political thriller 'The Secret Agent,' Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho turns to not a real historical tale but a fictional one, set in 1977 during Brazil's military dictatorship. Wagner Moura brings a natural movie-star cool to the role of Marcelo, a technology expert returning to his hometown of Recife where government corruption is rife and hitmen are on his tail. Vividly textured, with absurdist touches (the hairy leg of a corpse plays as a colorful metaphor for the dictatorship), 'The Secret Agent' seeks, and sometimes finds, its own logic of political resistance. 'I really believe that some of the most heartfelt texts come not necessarily from fact but from the logic of what is happening,' Filho said in an interview. 'Right, now the world seems to be running on some kind of new logic. Ten or 15 years ago, some of these ideas would be completely dismissed, even by the most conservative politicians. I think 'The Secret Agent' is a film full of mystery and intrigue but it does seem to have a certain logic which I associate with my country, Brazil.' Finding the rays of hope In nonfiction filmmaking, no one may be better today than Peck ('I Am Not Your Nego,' last year's 'Ernest Cole: Lost and Found' ) in connecting historical dots. 'Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5' marries Orwell's words (narrated by Damian Lewis) on totalitarian states that demand 'the disbelief of objective truth' with the actions of contemporary governments around the world, including Russia, Myanmar and the United States. Images of a bombed out Mariupol in 2022 runs with its official description: 'Peacekeeping operations.' It's not just geopolitical tremors quaking on movie screens in Cannes. Climate change and natural disaster are on the minds of filmmakers, too, sometimes in the most unlikely of movies. The French animated film 'Arco,' by illustrator Ugo Bienvenu, is about a boy from the distant future who lives on a 'Jetsons'-like platform in the clouds. He travels back in time to another future-time, 2075, where homes are bubbled to protect them from fire and storm, and robots do all of the parenting for working parents who appear to their children only as digital projections. It's a grim future, particularly so because it feels quite plausible. But the strange charm of 'Arco,' a brightly colored movie with a whole lot of rainbows, is that is offers a younger generation a dream of a future they might make. A relationship between the boy from the future and a girl who finds him in 2075 sparks not just a friendship but a nourishing vision of what's possible. 'Arco,' in that way, is a reminder that the most moving movies about our current doom offer a ray of hope, too. 'People are feeling disenchanted with the world, so we have to re-enchant them,' said Laxe, the 'Sirât' director. 'Times are tough but they're very stimulating at the same time. We'll have to look deeply into ourselves. That's what we're forced to do because it's a tough world now.' ___ Jake Coyle has covered the Cannes Film Festival since 2012. He's seeing approximately 40 films at this year's festival and reporting on what stands out. ___ For more coverage of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, visit:
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Orwell: 2+2=5' Review: Raoul Peck's Dynamic Look at Big Brother and Other Tyrants
George Orwell himself has gone in and out of favor over the revisionist years, but the British author's searing insights into empire and power and totalitarianism have never lost relevance. That's particularly true of his final work, the dystopian premonition 1984. Published 76 years ago, the novel is the core of Raoul Peck's documentary portrait of the writer. With a dynamic mix of biography and intellectual essence, and with the re-election of Donald Trump the obvious inflection point for its urgency, Orwell: 2+2=5 delves into the ways Orwell's arguments illuminate a century's worth of geopolitics. Peck, who profiled another writer of blistering moral clarity and prescience, James Baldwin, in I Am Not Your Negro, brings a healthy dose of sympathetic rage to his exploration of Orwell's worldview, and sensitivity to his life story. The rich selection of archival material is punctuated by new footage, clips from a fascinating cross-section of documentaries and dramas, including several screen iterations of 1984 and Orwell's novella Animal Farm, and outstanding graphics — notably a catalog of books that have been banned stateside and around the globe and a real-world Newspeak glossary that alone is worth the price of admission. More from The Hollywood Reporter Richard Linklater's 'Nouvelle Vague' Receives Electric 10-Minute-Plus Cannes Standing Ovation 'Renoir' Review: A Delicate and Touching Tokyo-Set Portrait of a Girl's Loneliness 'Nouvelle Vague' Review: Richard Linklater's Enjoyable Deep Dive Celebrates How Godard's 'Breathless' Came to Life Well-chosen and delivered with plummy, intimate gravity by Damian Lewis, all the words heard in the film were written by Orwell, in letters, books and essays. His life story is smartly distilled to key moments of political awakening. His work as a police officer in British-occupied Burma (now Myanmar, and one of the places where Peck filmed new material) sparked a profound awareness of the 'unjustifiable tyranny' of imperialism, and as a member of Britain's 'lower upper middle class,' he understood the impact on identity and personality of the social hierarchy. The windswept Scottish island Jura is another of the places where Peck gathered footage, to poignant effect. It was there, in a remote farmhouse, that the widowed Orwell spent a significant portion of his final years, raising his young son and writing Nineteen-Eighty Four, as it was titled when published in June 1949, seven months before his death at 46 from tuberculosis. Orwell's comments in a letter about his wartime stint at the BBC tap into an ambivalence that no doubt is familiar to many journalists in today's corporate media. 'Don't think I don't see how they are using me,' he says. 'But while here, I consider I have kept our propaganda slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been.' The interconnectivity of media and government is a central theme in Peck's documentary, as it is in 1984, with the Ministry of Truth rewriting history by the hour and the language called Newspeak spinning webs of propaganda out of euphemisms. The helmer delivers a brilliant compendium of 'prefabricated' terms and phrases, as Orwell called such verbiage, that have posed as political discourse over the decades, among them 'peacekeeping operations,' 'collateral damage,' 'illegals,' 'campaign finance,' 'recession' and, in one of the film's boldest swipes, 'antisemitism 2024.' And yet, in certain ways, the film doesn't go as deep as Orwell's observations; its choice of illustrative material generally hews to contemporary party lines, even while showcasing wise words that render such distinctions all but meaningless. 'Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy,' Orwell wrote, 'and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.' A crucial lesson I draw from Orwell, and from a lifetime of political hope and despair, is that whichever half of the American duopoly is telling us why the latest chapter in our perpetual war is necessary, they're almost certainly lying. Orwell's warnings apply across the board, not just when obvious despots and lackeys let their fascist flags fly. It's the filmmaker's prerogative, of course, if he wants to preach to the anti-Trump choir, but the preaching shifts into hyperventilating in a questionable segue from scenes of public hangings of Nazis in 1946 Ukraine to the chaos of January 6, 2021, in the U.S. Capitol. Though it has its blind spots and isn't as consistently potent as Peck's 2016 doc on Baldwin, Orwell: 2+2=5 is a vital film. Eric Arthur Blair, who took the pen name George Orwell, was impelled to write by a keen awareness of injustice and a need to expose lies. Casting the author's deathless words in a fresh light and gathering other dissident voices around him, Peck offers a sobering reminder of what's at stake in this technology-defined age of doublethink and thoughtcrime, the world that Orwell foresaw and we occupy — and of how, for a long time now, we've been losing the plot. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
Middle East Eye
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
ICJ Gaza delay lays bare the moral collapse of international law
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has recently postponed the deadline for Israel's defence in the case of South Africa v Israel to January 2026. The Court is tasked with determining whether Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. The international community - which swiftly condemned the 7 October attack within hours - has shown a striking reluctance to use the word genocide in this context, instead waiting for the world's highest court to validate the term. This hesitance persists even as the refusal to call a spade a spade breeds unimaginable horror. Worst of all, there remains a risk that the Court might ultimately decline to label the events as genocide. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Its hesitation to name what is unfolding, coupled with its casual tolerance for added bureaucracy in what may be the most urgent case of the century, suggests that it is susceptible to a form of moral bribery. Law versus justice International law is often mistaken for justice, but the two are not the same. Law can become a technical discipline so divorced from lived reality that it borders on the absurd. This is largely because many international lawyers are reluctant even to use the word justice. They argue that there is no clear way to define it, and so they adhere strictly to the rules set by states. Post-war international law upheld empire by resisting every attempt to reckon with colonisation Unsurprisingly, those rules tend to reflect the political will of the world's most powerful countries - most of which are former colonial powers. The rules and case law the Court will rely on to assess whether genocide has occurred in Gaza are narrow. These precedents fail to incorporate the lessons of genocides committed in colonial contexts. As elegantly illustrated by Raoul Peck in his documentary Exterminate All the Brutes, many such genocides were erased from history by their perpetrators, while accounts by the descendants of victims continue to be silenced. Indigenous peoples in Canada, Australia, the US and elsewhere were denied the right to tell their stories. The same applies to the millions massacred or maimed in retaliation for their resistance in Algeria, the Congo, Namibia, South Africa, Vietnam and beyond. We must acknowledge that much of the world remains ignorant of the history of colonisation - and that this ignorance is by design. International law, as a discipline, was a powerful instrument of colonial erasure. It developed in the service of European upper-class interests at the height of empire. Its legitimacy was justified under the banner of "civilisation" - a term that in practice meant anything serving European interests and egos. Post-World War Two international law did not mark a clean break with this history. On the contrary, it repeatedly resisted efforts by the Global South to force a reckoning with the legacy and ongoing reality of colonisation. An unspoken rule Even within the narrow legal precedents on genocide, Israel's conduct since its founding speaks for itself. The Court has already acknowledged that Israel is violating the highest-ranking norms of the international legal system. Any rational reading of the Court's advisory opinion on the legality of the Israeli occupation, issued last July, reveals the full picture. Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war If Israel is violating the right to self-determination, annexing land, enacting a system of racial segregation and apartheid, and committing countless other grave, systemic violations, then it is unmistakably a colonising state. Yet there remains an entire community of international lawyers afraid to call a spade a spade. To do so would mean breaking an unspoken rule: one must not validate the history of colonisation. As Israel terrorises Palestinians, the world looks away Read More » And once we accept that this is a colonial context, history shows us that genocide is a natural practice in such contexts. Moreover, Israel has worked meticulously to ensure it meets all the criteria for genocide under the Convention. It has deprived a population of more than two million people of water, electricity and food for extended periods. It has flattened entire cities and terrorised civilians with the most advanced weaponry the world has ever seen. Technological asymmetry and efficient mass killing are hallmarks of colonial violence. Today, Gaza has the highest number of child amputees ever recorded. The mutilation of bodies is a familiar image in colonial warfare. Thousands of Palestinian prisoners are subjected to systemic torture. These acts are not random - they are carried out with the clear intention of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people. That intention is carved into the very foundation of the Israeli state. Litmus test The only way to rule that this is not genocide is to deny both the history of colonisation and the reality on the ground. The judges of the ICJ are not ordinary people - they are, supposedly, among the most respected and well-educated legal minds in the world. They know the history of colonisation, and the parties to this case have ensured they are informed about the current reality in Gaza. The Court's recent decision to grant a delay should have set off alarm bells across the entire discipline. Why? Because without ink on paper, powerful states retain the leverage to avoid looking at themselves in the mirror. The case of Palestine has become a litmus test - not just for the humanity of the judges, but for the credibility of international law as a discipline Delaying justice in this case strengthens the hand of a settler-colonial project. It buys time - time to reshape the narrative and erase the evidence. The case of Palestine has become a litmus test - not just for the humanity of the judges, but for the credibility of international law as a discipline. The question that remains is whether the judges will succumb to political pressure and the unspoken rules of their field, resorting to vague language that leaves room for ambiguity and evasion. If the answer is yes, then the judges will have embraced the kind of wilful ignorance that the status quo rewards - especially in the face of normalised atrocity. Will they be morally bribed - consciously or unconsciously? Or will they finally break with international law's long history of normalising colonial erasure, and speak a word of justice in the face of the bloodiest atrocity of our lifetimes? The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Daily Maverick
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Ernest Cole: the South African photographer at the centre of a powerful and heartbreaking film
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found by Raoul Peck is a meditative film that draws on Cole's own notebooks and letters in a bold attempt to have him tell his own story. Ernest Cole is famous for photographing the everyday realities of South Africa's racist apartheid system. His 1967 book House of Bondage ensured his damning critique of the white minority regime was seen by the world. But its publication sent him into exile and was banned at home. The startling discovery of a vast archive of his work in a Swedish bank vault in 2017 has returned him to public view. House of Bondage was republished in 2023 and then, in 2024, celebrated Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck made Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. It would win the documentary prize at the Cannes Film Festival and show around the world, restoring the legacy of a photographer who died penniless in New York in 1990 at the age of 49. As a researcher of South African photography under apartheid, I was intrigued by how the film would convey this complex life story. It draws extensively on Cole's images, made in South Africa, Europe and the US. It's a beautiful, poetic interpretation of how his images mirrored his own experiences of oppression, displacement and the loneliness of exile. House of Bondage Cole was just 10 when the state introduced the Group Areas Act and entrenched racial segregation. He was 22 when his childhood neighbourhood of Eersterust was razed to the ground. His family was among the thousands forcibly removed to a new township. In his second year of high school, he elected to drop out. The state had introduced Bantu Education, designed to ensure Black children learned only enough for a life of servitude. Cole began to study by correspondence, taking a course with the New York Institute for Photography. By 18, he'd landed a position as a darkroom assistant at Drum magazine, working alongside German photographer Jürgen Schadeberg. In 1959, Cole saw a copy of French street photography pioneer Henri Cartier-Bresson 's The People of Moscow, and decided he would create a similar book to convey what it meant to live under apartheid. He spent six years taking the photographs that would become House of Bondage, a book that exposed the apartheid state. Determined to publish his images, he fled to the US in 1966, where his book appeared a year later. Acclaimed internationally, it was banned for 22 years in South Africa. Cole was prohibited from returning home and spent the next 20 years stateless. He hoped to find freedom in America. Instead, he felt pigeonholeed as a Black photographer, dismayed at only ever being commissioned to document suffering. He made hundreds of photographs of people in Harlem, often drawn to scenes that were impossible in South Africa. Mixed-race couples holding hands in public, young people of different races hanging out, neon signs offering 'Sex, sex, sex' rather than the 'Whites only' signs of segregation he documented at home. Commissioned to take photos in the Deep South, he found the same suffering and racism he'd thought particular to South Africa. In a letter to the Norwegian government requesting an emergency travel certificate to leave the US, he wrote: 'Exposing the truth at whatever cost is one thing. But having to live a lifetime of being a chronicler of misery and injustice and callousness is another.' A life in fragments For me, the most poignant moment of the film is the footage of Cole speaking in his own voice in a 1969 documentary. A slight man with a sorrowful gaze, he's seated at a table with prints of his photos: 'I've been banned in absentia, but that doesn't matter because it (his book) will stand in the future. Because I'm sure South Africa will be free.' His youthful conviction is undercut by the presence, in his voice, of the weight of all he's experienced. Correspondence shows Cole's book was sent to government officials in the US and Europe, and to the United Nations, but it would take decades of resistance before apartheid fell. Despite his fame and the support of leading international photographers, writers and editors, Cole's determination was ground down by the racism he encountered everywhere he went. Although he received grants to continue his work, he descended into poverty and depression. By the mid-1980s, he stopped taking photos – his cameras were lost, stolen, or sold, and he learned that his belongings, including negatives and prints that he'd left in a hotel storage room in New York, had been discarded. Cole was destitute and ill. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he watched Nelson Mandela 's release from prison in 1990 from his hospital bed. Cole died in New York that same year. All his negatives and the work he'd made during his life in exile were thought to be lost. Finding Ernest Cole Peck's meditative film draws on Cole's notebooks and letters, along with research interviews, in a rather bold attempt to have him 'tell his own story'. It's a story driven by both curiosity and heartbreak, narrated by actor LaKeith Stanfield, whose rather jarring American accent gives voice to a South African experience. Peck's script draws on interviews and research conducted by curator and researcher Gunilla Knape, who was associated with the Hasselblad Foundation, an organisation linked to the ongoing controversy over ownership of Cole's work. In 2017, Cole's nephew, Leslie Matlaisane, received an email requesting that he travel to Sweden to discuss the return of items belonging to his uncle, discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm. The film includes footage of Matlaisane's journey to Sweden and the bizarre scene that unfolds as Cole's archive is returned without any explanation about how it came to be either lost or found, or who'd placed it there. The boxes included 60,000 negatives, and Cole's notebooks and research materials for House of Bondage. An incredible trove of history has resurfaced, but as Peck's film shows, Cole himself was irrecoverably lost in exile. DM
