Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck blasted the Trump administration at the Joburg Film Festival on Wednesday, insisting that the world is at the mercy of “crazy people” who have put the lives of millions at stake.
“We are in the hands of a bunch of crazy people who have an agenda that was totally written out in Project 2025, the same way that Hitler wrote ‘Mein Kampf,’” Peck said. “All of it was there to read, and everybody thought he was making a joke. No. They are applying what they said they were going to do.
“The question is…what are we going to do [in response]?” he added. “We can’t tweet our way out of this one.”
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The Haitian filmmaker also lashed out at the administration’s dismantling of USAID and its disruption of the trans-Atlantic alliance, saying Trump is “breaking up what it took decades to build” after such institutions were created in part to protect post-war U.S. interests.
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“We are in a changed world,” he said. “What he’s doing, and sometimes with incredible ignorance, is going to change the life of many people on this planet.”
Peck was speaking to Variety in Johannesburg’s Theatre on the Square minutes after delivering a masterclass at the festival, which opened March 11 with his latest film, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” a portrait of the groundbreaking photographer who chronicled South African life under apartheid.
Over the course of a rousing, free-wheeling hour, the Haitian filmmaker, Oscar-nominated for “I Am Not Your Negro,” charted the course of his life and career, beginning with a childhood in Haiti that set the tone for his later work as a filmmaker.
“Coming from Haiti, I always felt a responsibility to tell my stories from our point of view as a little island that changed the history of the world,” he said, pointing to Haiti’s contribution to independence efforts across the Americas and its pivotal role in opening up the Western expansion of the U.S.
In 1961, his family moved to the newly independent Democratic Republic of Congo, where his parents were among the ranks of educated, French-speaking, middle-class Haitians recruited to rebuild after the sudden departure of the Belgian colonial rulers decimated the country’s professional classes. His father, an agronomist, was among the first group of scholars and doctors to arrive in a country whose first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, inspired Peck’s 2000 political thriller “Lumumba,” about the charismatic independence leader’s rise to power and eventual assassination.
Unable to return to Haiti because of the murderous dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Peck was educated in Kinshasa, New York and France, before studying film at the German Film and Television Academy in West Berlin. It was there, among exiled Iranian communists, Chilean revolutionaries and members of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), that Peck said his “real political training started.”
“I came to filmmaking through politics,” he said. “It was a means for me to be active, to educate, to make people aware what’s going on, to try to understand in what world we live, in what country we live, in what village we live. It’s a permanent call for action, for reflection, for how do we get allies.
“That’s where I learned that everything we do is political,” he added. “There’s not such a thing as doing something neutral. Your neutrality is a political act.”
“Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” which shared the prize for best documentary at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, traces the career and life of Cole, who in the late 1950s began chronicling everyday life under apartheid. After fleeing South Africa, he arrived in New York City in 1966, where he published his groundbreaking book “House of Bondage,” an astonishing account of life under the racist apartheid regime.
While that book made Cole a celebrated figure in the world of photography, he struggled to adapt to life as an exile in New York, grappling with isolation and depression. In a glowing review of “Lost and Found,” Variety’s Owen Gleiberman noted that the film “could be considered a companion piece” to “I Am Not Your Negro,” Peck’s probing character study of James Baldwin, whose meditations on what it meant to be Black in America as he wrestled with his own self-doubt and melancholy was similarly a “penetrating portrait of a Black artist.”
Speaking in Johannesburg, Peck offered his own reflections on working as a Black filmmaker, likening it to “a battle you have to be able to wage without being afraid to lose everything.”
“I’m part of the generation — people like Spike Lee — who came from film school and decided that they were not going to accept no as a response from the industry,” he said. “You fight to make each movie without compromising on your main belief, or whatever you’re fighting for.
“There is a price to pay, and you have to know your limits, and how to survive in the industry — an industry where, as a Black person, there was no room that was reserved for you. In fact, the industry can function perfectly without you, [although] we might have the illusion that things have changed over the years,” he added.
Peck noted that while Black filmmakers and actors have more opportunities across the industry today — partly due to the rapid growth of streaming platforms — “it doesn’t say anything about any transfer of power [because] we still have to go to someone else to get a green light.”
“The fight is even worse today than it was 20 years ago,” he said. “The #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, did advance the cause,” but of the many Black executives who were elevated in part on the strength of those movements, “most are out of their posts.”
Meanwhile, the filmmaker predicted that the second Trump presidency “will bring further disruption in the industry.”
“I am very pessimistic about where we are going, unless we decide to use the disruption that is occurring right now to build something else,” he said. “Because they are so busy separating the loot that they’re not looking [at] what we’re doing. There is a small window where a lot of things are possible.”
The Joburg Film Festival runs March 11-16.
